Cooking at home turned a little costlier across India last month, with onions, edible oil and cooking gas all pushing up kitchen bills, even as cheaper potatoes and tomatoes stopped the bill from climbing even further. The findings come from CRISIL Intelligence's monthly cost index, which offers one of the clearer month-on-month pictures of how essential food and fuel prices are showing up on Indian dinner tables.
The 'Roti Rice Rate' report from CRISIL Intelligence, the research arm of rating agency CRISIL, found that the average cost of putting together a vegetarian thali rose to Rs 29.5 in August. That is 1 percent higher than July and also 1 percent higher than what the same thali cost in August last year. The report pointed to onion, food oil, rice and LPG as the main drivers, noting that prices of all four stayed above year-ago levels through the month and fed straight into the cost of a daily meal at home.
Onion prices climbed the fastest
No ingredient moved as sharply as onions. A kilogram had cost around Rs 28 in August last year, and it rose to Rs 40 a kilogram in August this year, a jump of nearly 43 percent over twelve months. The increase was not just an annual trend either: onion prices alone climbed 17 percent compared with July. The report linked the spike to unseasonal rain and hailstorms that struck Maharashtra in March and April, which disrupted the standing crop and left supplies tighter in the months that followed.
Oil and LPG kept the pressure on
Other kitchen staples added to the squeeze. Food oil cost 11 percent more than it did a year earlier, while LPG cylinder prices were up 10 percent over the same period, and rice too traded at higher rates, all of which weighed on the overall cost of a vegetarian thali. The month was not uniformly expensive, though. Potato prices actually fell 12 percent in August, and tomatoes were down a steep 28 percent, and that drop in vegetable costs kept the thali's overall price rise from being sharper than it was.
Taken together, the numbers suggest that while the overall rise in thali costs was modest on paper, at just 1 percent for the vegetarian version, the ingredients behind that number moved very differently. Sharp gains in onion, oil, rice and cooking gas prices were largely offset by cheaper potatoes and tomatoes, without which the increase would likely have been steeper. The trend also shows why grocery bills do not always track headline inflation numbers in a straight line, since a handful of ingredients like onions can swing sharply from one harvest cycle to the next.
A non-vegetarian thali now costs Rs 57.5
A non-vegetarian thali cost Rs 57.5 in August, 5 percent more than the same month a year ago. That increase came mostly from broiler chicken, whose price rose nearly 10 percent on an annual basis. Measured against July, though, the non-veg thali actually turned cheaper by 1 percent, helped along by a 4 percent fall in broiler prices during the Shravan month, when meat consumption traditionally dips and demand, along with prices, tends to ease.
