India's inflation also K-shaped; villagers more hurt by price-rise: HSBC

Just like the post-pandemic recovery, the Indian inflation story is also 'K-shaped' and is hurting certain sections more than others, a foreign brokerage said on Tuesday. Rural consumers are more impacted by price-rise than their urban counterparts, economists at HSBC said, adding it outstripped the urban segment by 1.1 percentage point in May, mainly due to higher food inflation. "The same developments, driving a K-shaped recovery, seem to be driving K-shaped inflation dynamics," they said in a report. The report by its chief economist Pranjul Bhandari cited the ongoing heat waves, pointing out that higher food and lower core inflation are coexisting because of crop damage and livestock mortality pushing up the former. The government lent a helping hand by cutting several fuel prices but many of the fuels like petrol, diesel and LPG are not commonly used in rural areas, like they are in urban centres, leading to rural inflation being much higher than urban, it said. The report no