The year 2022 was supposed to mark the recovery of the Indian economy from the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns of the preceding two years. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February pushed up prices of food, fuel and fertilizer worldwide. In India consumer price inflation, which had declined to under 5 percent in the September-November period of 2021, has steadily increased, staying above 6 percent throughout 2022.    What happened to rural incomes in 2022? An...

Livemint While India staged a double-digit rebound in household consumption in FY22 which is set to expand at over 7% this fiscal, experts point out that India’s consumption story has a weakness — rural folk tightening their belt in the face of inflation.  The silver lining is that the worst may be over, unless El Nino conditions disrupt the arrival of the rains and dampen a consumption revival, experts said. Gross domestic product...

Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy consumer sentiments improved in January 2023. CMIE's Index of consumer Sentiments (ICS) reached 83.9, which is the highest since sentiments were hit severely by the Covid-19 induced lockdowns. The ICS, however, continues to remain lower than its pre-pandemic level. The ICS was at 105.3 in February 2020.  The recovery in consumer sentiments from the pandemic has been the slowest among all economic indicators. While most production indicators...

Food inflation rose sharply to 6.19% in January from 4.58% in December, led by rising prices of most segments Livemint.com The union government on Wednesday sold 385,000 tonnes of wheat worth ₹901 crore in the open market, in the second round of a planned auction of three million tonnes it plans to offload from the central pool to counter rising prices of the key foodgrain. The move assumes significance as India’s retail inflation...

Reuters Indian household's inflation expectations for the current period moderated by 20 basis points to 9.6%, while consumer confidence improved further, the results of the Reserve Bank of India's latest round of internal surveys conducted in January showed. As per the survey, respondents expect higher price pressures for household durables and cost of housing over the next three months as compared to the previous survey round, the release showed. Among consumption categories,...