Economists often tell the story about the drunk, the coin and the lamp-post. A drunk is searching around a lamp-post for a coin. On being asked where he dropped it, he waves unsteadily in the darkness beyond reach of the lamp-post’s light. Why not look there? Because, he tells you, the light’s over here. The point, for economists, is that our approach to problems is frequently warped by what data...

The government put out a promised new price index on Friday that will capture changes in prices of goods and services sold at the retail level, helping the government and the central bank get a better grip on policy tools while tackling inflation. Central banks world over rely on retail prices while framing monetary policy, but the Reserve Bank of India has had to consider mostly the wholesale price index...

The 50-year-old farmer knew from experience that his onion crop was doomed when torrential rains pounded his fields throughout September, a month when the Indian monsoon normally peters out. For lack of modern agricultural systems in this part of rural India, his land does not have adequate drainage trenches, and he has no safe, dry place to store onions. The farmer, Arun Namder Talele, said he lost 70 percent of...

So what caused the French Revolution? Food prices did. A hailstorm destroyed French crops, food prices rose 88 per cent in one year, and hungry Parisians turned on their rulers. Ditto with the Tian-an-men showdown exactly 200 years later, in 1989: consumer prices rose 21 per cent in a country that had known virtually no inflation under Communist rule. The Suharto regime got overthrown in Indonesia in 1998 after food...

Inflation in vegetables to come down to 7% by March Modernisation of agricultural marketing is important when dealing with inflation in the long run, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the planning commission, said here today. “The present system of intermediation is high costs and an efficient supply chain. Stress has to be laid on ensuring that farmers are able to realize higher margins, while consumers are able to get cheaper commodities”,...