BANGALORE, India, July 4 - It has been a little more than a year since the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came into power promising to embrace those excluded from the country's new economic prosperity.

While the impact of his government's efforts to help the poor - like increasing credit to the country's many farmers and pumping in money for infrastructure, especially in rural areas - will not show for another few years, experts say, the bounty from the expansion in manufacturing and services that has been putting money in the hands of millions of Indians is now noticeably trickling down.

"What is happening is amazing," said Joe Paul, the founder and chairman of the Uthsaha Society, a networking group that encourages slum dwellers in Bangalore to become financially independent. "It is a ripple effect."

For now, though, the ripple is largely an urban phenomenon, and seen mostly in the country's more developed regions. Elsewhere, especially in rural India, millions of poor people continue to eke out a living on less than $1 a day.

"Though India's villages desperately want to join in the growth, the changes are not yet enough to wipe out social inequities," said Chiranjib Sen, an economics professor at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, the country's premier business school.

Still, where the new prosperity is percolating, it spans a broad spectrum and reflects much more than an occasional, isolated success story. A big catalyst is the construction boom in high-tech cities like Bangalore and Madras. Besides the demand for construction workers, workers at factories supplying the building materials, and drivers to transport those products, there is a demand for housekeepers, cooks and drivers to cater to the double-income families who live in the new residential complexes and high-rises. Caterers are needed to supply food to the office workers. Security guards are also in demand. Trained nurses are needed to tend to aging parents of workers traveling overseas or living in other cities.

"The last few years of strong growth has facilitated poverty reduction, even though the fruits of growth were not distributed evenly," said Ping Chew, a sovereign credit analyst at Standard & Poor's in Singapore. "The middle-income group continues to be the biggest beneficiary and this will ensure that the benefits continue to pass on to the lower-income class."

Economists expect the source of the trickle to continue. After last year's 8.5 percent growth, growth in the year ended in March 2005 was 6.9 percent.

That should mean more stories like that of Shobha Shankar. Three years ago, Ms. Shankar, now 28, was a stay-at-home mother of two in Bangalore. With her husband's sari business foundering, she was forced to seek a career. She wanted to learn to ride a scooter so she could market the saris, to supplement her husband's meager monthly income of 3,000 rupees ($69). Instead, at the driving school where she enrolled, she found herself learning to drive a car. She was so good that her instructors roped her in to teach others.

Ms. Shankar's new teaching skills coincided with a surge of first-time car owners in the city - other beneficiaries of the ripple. She was soon able to buy herself a used car and set up a branch of a driving school. She now earns about 15,000 rupees ($344) a month and business is expanding fast. "Three years ago, we didn't have a phone connection at home and I coveted a cellphone," said Ms. Shankar, who now owns two cellphones, regularly takes her family out to dine, and has bought a refrigerator and a washing machine. Her husband cares for their two daughters and tends to the house.

Though India's progress in poverty reduction can slow, a continuing study, Rethinking India's Future, by the Strategic Foresight Group, a research organization based in Mumbai, has tracked upward mobility for an increasing number of Indians, at all economic levels.

According to a recent update of the study, the top level, the country's so-called business-class economy - covering those who can afford things like air travel and Internet connections - grew from 20 million Indians in mid-2002 to 24 million this year, or from 2 percent of the population to 2.2 percent. The "bike economy," including those who own a motorized two-wheeler and a phone, and can afford to travel by train, increased from 15 percent of the population to 16.8 percent, while the "bullock cart category," or those without even basic amenities and who can afford only to ride a cart pulled by a bull or go barefoot, had contracted 2 percentage points, to 81 percent.

"Opportunities are expanding for the lower classes, whether vendors, domestic workers or garment factory workers," said Santosh Vaz, chairwoman of Janodaya, a Bangalore-based nongovernmental organization that helps place domestic help and factory workers. Ms. Vaz has even been able to negotiate minimum wages of up to three times a worker's previous salary, and standard labor benefits, something unheard-of for domestic labor even a few years ago.

Mr. Paul, whose networking group is spread across several Bangalore slums, says housing is one of the best indicators of change, and in the last few years most of the ramshackle huts with plastic sheet roofs in Ejipura, Bangalore's biggest slum, have transformed into one-room concrete houses. Televisions, refrigerators, and cellphones are high on the shopping lists of residents, he said, and in many cases, both husband and wife work "because they want to have that much more."

Sanjeevi Kumar, 32, is among the Epijura residents hoisting themselves up. Mr. Kumar dropped out of school after third grade, sold kerosene and then was a construction worker for several years at a daily wage of 32 rupees (73 cents). Those were tough times, he said. But two years ago, he won a garbage collection contract from some of Bangalore's booming outsourcing companies, and with money he had managed to save or borrow, he rented a truck to transport the waste.

His stable income helped him get a 60,000-rupee ($1,377) loan for a long-term rental of a one-room home in Ejipura, as well as a new TV.

"Our slum has changed in the last couple of years," Mr. Kumar said. "Everybody is working hard to catch up with each other." He hopes to be able to shift his son, 13, and daughter, 11, from a free government school to a private school that could cost 500 rupees ($11.48) a month for tuition and books - a big step in a country where only about half the children their age ever step inside any school.

Along with such promising examples, though, disparities in growth have increased among the country's regions.

The national government's increased focus on education, communication infrastructure and health care in rural areas should help somewhat, said Vivek Gupta, managing director of the consulting firm A. T. Kearney, India.