-The Hindu Business Line Experts attribute it to higher cost of providing goods and services and more money under schemes Retail inflation based on Consumer Price Index (CPI) for rural areas is higher than urban areas for four successive months with West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Haryana recording double-digit rural retail inflation in April. These are among the 17 States that witnessed higher retail inflation in rural areas. However, in Karnataka, Kerala,...

-Financial Express Dataset and methodological weaknesses cast doubt on recent poverty estimates that claim drastic reduction Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani in a working paper (IMF), claimed India’s poverty, per a $1.9 per person per day poverty line (at PPP), was 0.9% of the population in 2020. Thanks to government transfer of free rations of 5 kg per person month, it fell to 0.8% (from 0.9% in 2019). Roy and de Velt, for...

-The Hindu Why are food, clothing and fuel prices higher in the hinterland? Will a good monsoon help ease the crisis? The story so far: The retail inflation rate surged to 6.95% this March — its highest level in nearly one and a half years, capping off six successive months of accelerating prices for consumers. With incremental fuel price hikes only kicking in during the latter half of March, the full impact...

-Livemint.com Top packaged consumer goods companies had also flagged slowing rural demand in the December quarter, citing inflationary pressures NEW DELHI: Top honchos of large fast moving consumer goods companies have flagged slowdown in rural demand in the March quarter, citing high inflation across products and commodities. Analysts Manoj Menon, Aniket Sethi, and Karan Bhuwania at brokerage ICICI Securities interviewed chief executive officers of companies such as Marico Ltd., Dabur India, and Tata...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...