From SBI's Dinesh Khara to Nomura's Sonal Varma: Who said what on India's 17-month high retail inflation

Arvind Sanger, Managing Partner, Geosphere Capital Management: “Inflation is going to be a persistent problem globally, and India is no exception. And, frankly, RBI has been one of the most dovish, amongst the major central banks in the world, in terms of not moving. And now that the WPI has already been giving us warning signals here, it was running in the mid to low teens; 13-15 percent in the last several months and now CPI is starting to accelerate.”

Nilesh Shah, MD, Kotak AMC: "What debt market will be looking forward to is the trajectory of inflation, does it remain elevated above RBI’s target level of 6 percent or does it start coming down as expected by the RBI, which is guided towards 5.7 percent inflation for FY23.”

Sonal Varma, MD & Chief Economist-India, Nomura Financial Advisory & Securities: “Inflation was already tracking above 6 percent For FY23 prior to the upper surprise we have seen in March. There are a bunch of supply-side adjustments that are pending, demand-side pressures that are building up and second-order effects that will play out. We were expecting on average CPI inflation at 6.2 percent in FY23, given the upside surprise in the March reading we have revised up our FY23 average estimate to about 6.6 percent.”

Ananth Narayan, Professor, SPJIMR: “It does look like we are going to have repeated 6 percent plus, I agree with 6.6 percent as well as a distinct possibility. In fact, the April print, by the way, might be higher than 7 percent given the oil price adjustment as well so watch out for all of that. Granted that we should be controlling inflation, that is the primary mandate of the MPC. Granted that remains the biggest important decision to be made but the problem with the monetary policy framework is it has become dangerously simplistic. The framework gives the impression you can keep CPI within a range merely by changing the repo rate. Macroeconomics is far more complicated than that, as the last two decades have shown and this is dangerously simplistic.”

Rajnish Kumar, Former Chairman, SBI: “Repo rate, RBI has been holding but this time the stance has been different, it has been changed and if you look at the 10-year G-Sec, if you take representative 10-year G-Sec is representative and not the repo rate, then we have seen almost 125 basis point increase in last 15 months. So, that is a pointer itself that yes, there is an inflation building up and today, when you talk to anybody, this is one of the hottest topics about inflation. It is not only for the consumer, but for all the industry and we are seeing upward pressure on the prices, but again, not so much as to demand-driven, but the supply side driven.”