Food spending rises in rural areas, gap with urban centres shrinks
New Delhi, December 28, 2024.REVERSING A DECLINING trend from over a decade, the share of food in monthly expenditure of households in rural as well as urban areas went up in 2023-24, according to the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) 2023-24 fact sheet released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) on Friday.This probably reflects the impact of higher food prices; given that the figures are in nominal terms, the share of food in the consumption basket of rural households went up to 47.04 per cent in 2023-24 from 46.38 per cent in 2022-23, while that for urban households inched higher to 39.68 per cent in 2023-24 from 39.17 per cent in the previous year.The HCES data also showed that the difference in average monthly consumption expend...
