Despite the much-hyped rural consumption boom and all the social sector programmes of the government, the income inequality between the rural and urban consumer widened to 91% in the first five years of the United Progressive Alliance coming to power in 2004. According to the 66th round of the household Consumption Expenditure survey released by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) on Friday, the per capita expenditure level of the urban...

-The Business Standard   Indian economy has been on a sustained growth path, but Indians are still spending a major chunk of their expenditure on food items. Per capita Consumption Expenditure in a month was 88 per cent more in case of urban India compared to rural India during 2009-10, a trend which was more or less five years ago, according to the latest figures on Consumption Expenditure. Per capita expenditure on consumption for...

There’s not much difference between the spending patterns of the urban and rural poor but the city-village divide becomes much wider amongst the rich in each class. These are some of the key findings of the National Sample Survey Organisation’s (NSSO) 66th round of survey on household Consumption Expenditure. The survey, which was carried out between July, 2009 and June, 2010 has revealed that the poorest 10 per cent of India’s...

-The Business Standard   Too many baseless conclusions are being drawn from bad data The Planning Commission, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) and the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) are being overseen by some of the brightest minds in the Indian government for many years now. Both together and individually they have made a travesty of the data being brought out, debated and used for...

-PTI   High volatility and price swings in food commodities are likely to prevail for the rest of this year and could continue into 2012, UN body Food and Agriculture Organisation today said. “High and volatile agricultural commodity prices are likely to prevail for the rest of this year and into 2012,” Food and Agriculture Organisation said in a statement. The next few months will be critical in determining how the major crops...