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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Festive Surge

India’s bazaars have glittered this Diwali with the unmistakable glow of consumer confidence. The country’s festive sales crossed a staggering Rs. 6 lakh crore with goods alone accounting for Rs. 5.4 lakh crore and services contributing Rs. 65,000 crore. More remarkable still, the bulk of this spending flowed through India’s traditional markets rather than e-commerce platforms. After years of economic caution and digital dominance, Indians are once again shopping in person and buying local....

Festive Surge

India’s bazaars have glittered this Diwali with the unmistakable glow of consumer confidence. The country’s festive sales crossed a staggering Rs. 6 lakh crore with goods alone accounting for Rs. 5.4 lakh crore and services contributing Rs. 65,000 crore. More remarkable still, the bulk of this spending flowed through India’s traditional markets rather than e-commerce platforms. After years of economic caution and digital dominance, Indians are once again shopping in person and buying local. This reversal owes much to policy. The recent rationalisation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) which trimmed rates across categories from garments to home furnishings, has given consumption a timely push. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s September rate cuts, combined with income tax relief and easing interest rates, have strengthened household budgets just as inflation softened. The middle class, long squeezed between rising costs and stagnant wages, has found reason to spend again. Retailers report that shoppers filled their bags with everything from lab-grown diamonds and casual wear to consumer durables and décor, blurring the line between necessity and indulgence. The effect has been broad-based. According to Crisil Ratings, 40 organised apparel retailers, who together generate roughly a third of the sector’s revenue, could see growth of 13–14 percent this financial year, aided by a 200-basis-point bump from GST cuts alone. Small traders too have flourished. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) estimates that 85 percent of total festive trade came from non-corporate and traditional markets, a robust comeback for brick-and-mortar retail that had been under siege from online rivals. This surge signals a subtle but significant cultural shift. The “Vocal for Local” and “Swadeshi Diwali” campaigns struck a patriotic chord, with consumers reportedly preferring Indian-made products to imported ones. Demand for Chinese goods fell sharply, while sales of Indian-manufactured products rose by a quarter over last year. For the first time in years, “buying Indian” has become both an act of economic participation and of national pride. The sectoral spread of this boom underlines its breadth. Groceries and fast-moving consumer goods accounted for 12 percent of the total, gold and jewellery 10 percent, and electronics 8 percent. Even traditionally modest categories like home furnishings, décor and confectionery recorded double-digit growth. In the smaller towns that anchor India’s consumption story, traders say stable prices and improved affordability kept registers ringing late into the festive weekend. Yet, much of this buoyancy rests on a fragile equilibrium. Inflation remains contained, and interest rates have been eased, but both could tighten again. Sustaining this spurt will require continued fiscal prudence and regulatory clarity, especially as digital commerce continues to expand its reach. Yet for now, the signs are auspicious. After years of subdued demand and inflationary unease, India’s shoppers appear to have rediscovered their appetite for consumption and their faith in domestic enterprise. The result is not only a record-breaking Diwali, but a reaffirmation of the local marketplace as the heartbeat of India’s economy.

From Here to Humidity

Once famed for its seasons, Pune now has only two: hot and hellishly humid.


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In 1969, The Beatles released ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ a lilting ode to warmth and renewal after “a long, cold, lonely winter.” For millions in Britain and the broader Anglosphere, the song captures the near-spiritual joy that accompanies the first rays of spring sunshine after months of gloom. To be British is, in part, to revere the sun as a guest who is fleeting, temperate and always welcome.


Today, in India, especially in Pune, that metaphor has curdled into something altogether more menacing. The sun no longer arrives as gentle deliverance but barges in like a houseguest who won’t leave, turns up the thermostat and unplugs the fan. Once famed for its moderate climate and four distinct seasons, Pune now finds itself baking under unrelenting heat, with humidity levels more appropriate for coastal cities than this inland plateau. The ‘Queen of the Deccan,’ perched on the leeward side of the Western Ghats, has become a pressure cooker - and nobody’s singing about it.


Its residents boasted of four well-behaved seasons and temperatures that gently dropped at night, permitting woollen shawls and steaming chai. That era is now relegated to nostalgia. In its place we have a relentless, humid inferno that stretches for nearly ten months of the year, culminating in brief, erratic interludes of rain or respite. Welcome to the new Pune, where summer files a restraining order against winter.


In recent weeks, mercury levels have breached 42°C, a threshold once deemed an aberration but now increasingly routine. Worse, the city has added a new meteorological torture to its arsenal: humidity.


In a place known for its dry heat, residents now suffer through 33°C that feels like 38°C. The numbers may seem minor, but the lived experience is punishing. Clothes cling. Tempers flare. Electricity bills soar. And all of this, it turns out, is a result not of planetary misfortune but of civic greed and ecological amnesia.


The science behind Pune’s descent into sweat-stained misery is straightforward and unflattering. Experts cite the ‘urban heat island effect,’ where concrete and asphalt trap heat like a pressure cooker lid as a leading cause.


The city’s rampant greyscaping has displaced its once-lush green and blue patches with glassy high-rises and manicured lawns. Rainfall, when it arrives, does so in torrential spurts, flooding the soil and saturating the air with evaporative moisture. The result is a city that is hot, humid and increasingly uninhabitable for parts of the year.


Microclimate studies show stark disparities even within the city. Affluent neighbourhoods like Koregaon Park enjoy leafy canopies and cooler microclimates, while densely built areas like Shivajinagar suffer the brunt of thermal intensification. Looming over all of this is the spectre of climate change which amplifies every local vulnerability.


The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) insists on seasonal normalcy, but reality keeps jumping the gun. This year’s monsoon, it predicts, will bring above-normal rainfall. But if recent trends are any guide, Punekars are likely to broil in humidity long before the first raindrops fall. Already, the monsoon has ‘unofficially’ hit Kerala earlier than expected, a sign that the atmosphere is no longer consulting bureaucratic calendars. In Pune, where the rains once arrived like clockwork in mid-June, their onset now fluctuates wildly, sometimes teasing in May, sometimes ghosting into July.


The consequences extend beyond mere discomfort. Prolonged heatwaves and unstable rain patterns threaten agriculture in the surrounding regions, stress water resources and strain public health infrastructure.


Worst of all, winter, which was once Pune’s pride, is now a cameo season. Where the city once enjoyed a crisp three-month interlude of cool air and clear skies, it now receives little more than a shrug. Climate data suggests that Pune is becoming a two-season city: ‘Hot’ and ‘Hotter with Humidity.’ It is a calendar with only two unbearable pages, both borrowed from Mumbai’s climatic misery.


Solutions exist, but they are inconvenient. Restoring urban green spaces, implementing sustainable construction codes, encouraging rainwater harvesting and taxing excessive concretisation would all help reverse the thermal tide. These obviously require political will and public patience, something even scarcer than shade in the summer.


In the meantime, Pune must accept a new identity: no longer regal and temperate, but flushed and feverish, its crown swapped for a sweatband.

(The writer is an independent journalist with a keen interest in environmental issues and urban ecology. Views personal)

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