Tomato prices are up through the roof. Retail prices are in the range of Rs 120-150 per kilogram in most mandis across India, making the household vegetable more expensive than petrol. Prices, which at the beginning of the year were in the range of Rs. 25 a kg, have increased by an order of between 500-600 percent.   What does the data show? The National Horticultural Board is a body under the...

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...

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...

Economic Times Unilever global chief executive Alan Jope said high inflation impacted demand from low income consumers in Indian villages even as growth remains stronger in cities. "The market growth in India remains stronger in urban areas than in rural areas and that reflects the high impact of high food inflation on low income consumers. We are seeing rural markets broadly flat in value terms with lower volumes," Jope said during its...

DeCEDA/Qrius 2022 was a milestone year for India. India walked into 2022 with an infectious wave of Covid-19 impacting lakhs of people, the wave receded a few weeks into the year. As hopes for a post-pandemic recovery surged, war in Ukraine brought in new challenges for the economy. With supply chains disrupted, global sanctions imposed on Russia, prices of fuel and food shot up. Inflation, already on a high from pent-up...