Towards the end of last year India successfully launched Mangalyaan, the country's first Mars-bound orbiter and so confirmed its premier league position in the highly capital-intensive technology sector.

A few weeks later the media reported that 17 residents had died in Goa after the partly built tower block they were occupying collapsed.

These two stories symbolise the growing economic dislocation taking place in India. For some, the last two decades of neoliberal reforms have seen their wealth and political power grow stratospherically.

But for the vast majority of the country's 1.3 billion people, the harsh reality of the economic realignment has seen living standards fall back to earth.

The reforms were instigated in the early 1990s by then Congress Party finance minister, and now prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

Successive Indian governments, both those led by the nominally centrist Congress and the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have pursued policies of tariff reductions, increased capital and investment inflows, privatisations, full currency convertibility for the rupee and the dismantling of many of the Nehru-era price controls that ensured most of Indian's poorest could afford food and fuel basics.

Such approaches are actively and aggressively supported by the institutions of government, both at a federal and a state level, resulting in an economy deliberately dominated by a few sectors and the main urban areas.

These sugar-rush policies locking the Indian economy into the broader international capitalist system have certainly resulted in years of impressive headline growth, with the average annual figure over the decade to 2012/13 reaching 7.9 per cent.

Wealth per adult has risen by 135 per cent from $2,000 (£1,200) in 2000 to $4,700 (£2,850) in 2013, at an average rate of 8 per cent.

Yet growth rates have declined recently. The 2012/13 figure fell to 5 per cent for the economy as a whole, with significant deceleration in the underpowered manufacturing and capital goods sectors.

The failure of policymakers to encourage sustained investment in manufacturing is brought into stark relief when compared with its more overtly socialist neighbour, China.

At its peak, manufacturing accounted for 17 per cent of the Indian economy. Today that has fallen to 14 per cent. During the three decades to 2010, the figure for China was over a third.

More tellingly, the spoils of this growth have largely been concentrated in the hands of international corporations, existing elites and a rising new urban bourgeoisie with interests in stock market speculation and the retail, property and broader services sectors.

According to a 2013 Credit Suisse report, the number of Indian dollar millionaires leapt from 158,000 to 182,000 in one year alone.

The report predicts that over the next five years India could add another 120,000 millionaires to this total.

Yet most Indians are struggling under the contradictions of this economic phase, even those attracted to the cities and employed within the growth sectors.

The unregulated growth in cities has resulted in infrastructural, cultural and communal stresses.

Inflation indices are high and growing. The all-India general inflation figure in 2012/13 was over 10 per cent.

Food inflation, especially for animal products and also cereals and vegetables, has grown most rapidly.

There is growing evidence of deliberate hoarding by wholesalers to bump up commodity prices.

The Indian central bank recently added to people's woes by raising interest rates to a new high of 8 per cent.

The main losers have been the rural communities which, in spite of growing urbanisation, still comprise the overwhelming majority of the population. According to the 2011 census, 69 per cent of the population live in the countryside.

Many farmers are losing their long-held land rights to property speculators and outright state thievery and the adivasis or tribal groups face expropriation of their ancestral lands to mineral extraction companies with only the most basic compensation, if any.

Foreign companies use their leverage with corrupt and compliant local elites to bypass their obligations to mitigate the social and environmental impacts of their investments.

In one recent high-profile case in the eastern state of Odisha, a South Korean steel company successfully dodged any binding commitments to invest in social projects in compensation for farmers evicted from the government-owned land that will be used to build its new mill.

Government agricultural policies and inefficiencies have also combined to immiserate tens of millions of rural citizens.

In spite of a more interventionist approach to agriculture production, the 11th Agricultural Plan, one of the last vestiges of social democratic India which ended in 2012, seems to have undershot its growth targets, not least because of under-funding. The Indian government now spends just 0.2 per cent of GDP on this vital sector.

This plan and its successor have seen deliberate efforts by the government to draw farming communities into a more capitalist mode of production. It has encouraged farmers to switch from traditional produce to cash crops.

The resulting increases in farm input costs, especially fuel and fertilisers, when married to the fact that the distribution, exchange and prices of these cash crops are controlled by local and international buying operations has driven millions of families backwards into greater debt and despair.

One result of this rural indebtedness is the spiralling number of farming suicides.

A 2009 article by the rural affairs editor of The Hindu noted that 200,000 farmers had taken their lives in the decade to 2007. Many more have died since.

It is no surprise then that the economy - and responses to the growing inequalities in Indian society - is the key issue in the forthcoming general election, more so than in previous contests where identity issues predominated.

As Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat has said, "We are concerned more about the economic factors in politics. We are very clear that we are against [these] neoliberal policies."

Paul Simon's next article will look at the prospects for the main party blocs in April's elections and the wider social and political responses to these economic developments