Food inflation eases, but fuel goes hike

New Delhi: Food inflation fell to 16.30 percent for the week ended March 6 on easing prices of pulses and vegetables, but fuel inflation shot up to 12.68 percent.

For the previous week, food inflation was at 17.81 percent and fuel inflation at 11.38 percent.

Vegetable prices showed a marked decline of more than 10 percent over the week, followed by about 4 percent fall in prices of pulses. Urad and arhar prices was down 6 percent each during the week.

However, the easing in food prices has been marred by rising fuel inflation giving no respite to the overall inflation that has been consistently rising since it came out of sub-zero levels in September last year.

The fuel index comprising fuel, power, light and lubricants saw an inflation of 12.68 per cent over the week led by 16.82 per cent inflation in petrol prices and 14.99 percent in diesel prices.

The rise in fuel prices is as a result of the budgetary announcement of a hike in excise and customs duty on petrol and diesel.

The overall inflation has risen to 9.89 percent for February from a low of 1.34 percent in October last year, primarily led by high food prices.

Overall the inflation has already breached the RBI’s projection of 8.5 per cent for the fiscal-end in January when it touched 8.56 per cent.

Related posts:

1. FM rules out rollback of fuel price hike
2. India’s annual food inflation up at 17.56 percent
3. Sonia Gandhi signals support for fuel price hike
4. Inflation rises to 8.56 per cent in January from 7.31 percent in December.
5. Inflation could top 10% by March

Tags: deflation, fuel prices, inflation, inflation in food

• Business

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.