India's food inflation ran at 5.95% in August, on a headline CPI print of 4.82%, and most economists expect September's number to push retail inflation overall to a 20-month high near 4.8% — the third straight month above the RBI's comfort band. Read as a single figure, that looks like broad-based food inflation: everything costing more, evenly, across the basket. It isn't. Ginger prices are up 73.82% year-on-year. Onion is up 48.27%. Garlic is up 43.60%. Tomato, over the same twelve months, is down 31.09%. Potato is down 13.14%. The "average" of 5.95% is hiding two opposite stories, not describing one.
Why the same number can mean rising and falling at once
The split isn't random, and it isn't about GST. India's GST 2.0 reforms already moved most packaged food to 5% and fresh produce carries no GST at all — the tax code has nothing to do with what's driving ginger and onion prices this year. What's driving them is weather. Rainfall across several key agricultural belts has come in more than 15% below normal this Kharif season, and flood damage in specific growing regions has hit aromatics and bulb crops — ginger, onion, garlic — harder than it's hit the bulk vegetable staples. At Delhi's Azadpur mandi, the country's largest wholesale vegetable market, flood-disrupted supply has pushed prices up 11–34% depending on the item, tracking almost exactly the item-level CPI split.
| Item | YoY price change | Driven by |
|---|---|---|
| Ginger | +73.82% | Flood-hit Kharif supply, thin acreage |
| Onion | +48.27% | Same, plus storage-stock drawdown |
| Garlic | +43.60% | Same |
| Potato | -13.14% | Larger, less weather-exposed harvest |
| Tomato | -31.09% | Oversupply from base-year comparison |
Tomato and potato are large-acreage staples grown across a wide geographic spread, which makes them more resilient to a flood hitting any single belt — and tomato in particular is falling partly because last year's price was unusually high, making this year's comparison look better than the absolute price actually feels at the till. Ginger, onion and garlic are grown on comparatively concentrated acreage, so a bad monsoon in the wrong district shows up in the national price index almost immediately.
Who actually feels which price
The averaging problem isn't just statistical, it's distributional. Tomato and potato sit at the base of almost every Indian household's weekly basket regardless of income — they're bought in bulk, cooked daily, and their falling prices genuinely do put money back in a family's pocket. Ginger and garlic are used in far smaller quantities per meal, which is exactly why a 74% or 44% price jump on them barely dents a monthly grocery bill in isolation. But onion is the exception that breaks that comfort: it's a bulk, base-of-basket item like tomato and potato, not a small-quantity aromatic like ginger and garlic, and it's up 48%. Onion price spikes have a specific, ugly history in Indian retail politics — they've moved state election results before — precisely because they hit the same high-frequency, high-volume purchase as tomato and potato, just from the losing side of this year's weather lottery instead of the winning one.
That's also why a single national CPI print consistently understates how this feels on the ground for any one household. A family that cooks with a lot of onion and little ginger is living through a much sharper price shock than the 5.95% headline suggests. A family further from Delhi's supply chains, buying from a mandi closer to the flood-hit growing regions than Azadpur, may be seeing an even larger version of the same 11–34% spike the wholesale data shows. The number that gets published is a national average of extremely local, extremely item-specific shocks, and none of the households living through it experience the average.
What the mandi data says about what's next
Supply, not price policy, is the variable that will settle this. Kharif sowing for the affected aromatics — the crop that would ordinarily be arriving in mandis from October through December — has already been reduced by the same rainfall deficit that drove the flooding in growing regions like the western onion belt and northern ginger-growing districts. That means the current price spike isn't a short-term shock waiting to be arbitraged away by traders releasing stored stock; the stock to release was smaller to begin with, because the crop it came from was smaller to begin with. Storage-linked easing, the kind that has calmed past onion spikes once release from cold storage picked up, is a weaker lever this year precisely because the shortfall started upstream, in the field, rather than downstream, in the warehouse.
That's the basis for economists' calls that food inflation above 5.5% is "very much on the cards" through October: the relief, if it comes, arrives with the next harvest window, not with any policy lever available to the government between now and then. A further GST adjustment, a stock-release order, or an import relaxation on onion or garlic could all shave a few points off the spike at the margin — India has used import relaxation on onion before, in past shortage years — but none of them grow a crop that didn't get planted, or undo the rain that didn't fall in the right place at the right time.
The number that doesn't move
This is also why the GST rate cuts that took effect through the second half of 2025 aren't showing up as relief here. A tax cut lowers the price at a given level of supply; it does nothing when the supply itself has shrunk. For a household budget, that means the relief promised at the checkout counter a year ago and the receipt in hand today are simply describing different things — one a tax rate, the other a crop that didn't come in. The 5.95% headline will keep reading as moderate right up until the month a family actually needs ginger, onion or garlic for a festival meal and finds out which side of that average they were always standing on.