Still, on the contrary in the cities, more than 30% of the population is obese. This is largely due to the popularity of oily food and sweets, and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. The problem is so common that obese people looking for love now even have their own website, overweightshadi.com, to help them find a partner to marry.

Obesity in India may be relatively new, but it’s not only because the middle class is eating more. Research shows that Indians are genetically at greater risk of becoming obese because they store more body fat per kilogram than average.

The Director of Fortis Hospitals, Anoop Misra, is adamant: “We should act early. The moment somebody crosses the 23 Body Mass Index, we start telling them what to eat, how much to exercise, and what investigations to do, because they are at a heightened risk of developing diabetes.”

No wonder, then, that urban Indians are signing up for weight loss programs out of fear of disease.

“There's definitely an increase in the percentage, about 25% to 30% every year. That's because obesity is becoming a very big problem and people are realizing the fact that they cannot lose weight on their own. They definitely need to go to a place which actually performs scientific weight loss,” insists Vandanaa Luthra, Founder of VLCC Health Care.

But in rural India, the notion that people could be so fat they are unhealthy would be seen as a poor joke, at best. Urban India may be getting fatter, but for the poor struggling for survival, obesity seems very far off.