The stress on the Indian economy is beginning to show up in data. The wholesale price index (WPI) for April, at 8.3% over the past year, has seen a sharp jump over the March number, which stood at 3.88%. Fuel inflation, no surprises, is the harshest, up almost 25%.

Also visible is the pressure on the government finances, as the consumer price index (CPI) for April was less than half this number at 3.48%, up marginally from March at 3.40%. While it might be incorrect to directly compare WPI and CPI data, the fact that the government has absorbed higher fuel prices till now is beginning to show up in the sharp increase in the gap between the two numbers.

Oil companies are losing ₹1,000 crore a day, said petroleum and natural gas minister Hardeep Singh Puri earlier this month. It is only a matter of time before the higher fuel costs are passed on and begin to affect households. The silver lining is that food prices are still benign at 2.31% in the WPI and at 4.20% in the CPI. But these will get impacted due to the double shock of a weaker monsoon and the potential fertiliser shock.

The 2020s are becoming a brutal decade. Whereas the world has always been in some crisis or another, the scale, frequency,........

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