(Un)common suffering: distributional impact of recent inflation in India

The recent inflation in India is special both because of its peaks as also for its persistence. While couple of years back the rising inflation was blamed on global factors, this time around there is no denying the fact that it is due to structural problems of our economy, especially those related to the agricultural, specifically the foodgrains sector. Impact of the recent inflation is also not shared equally, with the bottom strata facing uncommon difficulties, as their purchasing power seems to have been halved over the last four years. This short paper estimates effective inflation rates faced by different income/consumption groups in India and comments on the distributional impact.