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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.

How do I manage my household waste?

Updated: Oct 22, 2024

household waste

So friends, in my last week’s article, I wrote about the suffering of poor cows when they innocently and unknowingly consume plastic bags with left over food inside. These plastic bags are unwanted materials in their stomachs. Cows and all such animals have a stomach made up of four chambers. It is equipped to digest only the grasses and other vegetation or similar type of nutritious food meant for them.

Obviously, plastic is not their food. The poor cows then fall sick and are unable to carry on with there lives unless some good souls, notice the bulging bellies of these animals and take them to a veterinary surgeon to perform a surgery and take out all that plastic stuff out of their stomachs. There are such groups spread across who take care of such sick cows. There are records indicating that the vets have removed anywhere between 20 kilograms to 80 kilograms of plastic bags from cow’s stomachs. And we are responsible for this.

Another issue with plastic material lying in the garbage heap is that, this plastic does not remain contained within that heap. Being much lighter in weight, it gets carried away due to wind or rainwater. It will eventually settle in the nallahs and gutters and will flow into smaller and then larger waterbodies like rivers, creeks and estuaries, only to find its way into our oceans and seas. Lot more about plastic waste will eventually appear in this column. Furthermore, different types of flies, including the houseflies also get attracted to this garbage.

The flies that visit the garbage are also the same flies that roam around your lunch buffet and drop their offsprings on your plate. By doing so, they increase the risk of you contracting with salmonella, which causes typhoid fever, food poisoning, enteric fever, gastroenteritis, and other major illnesses. Besides flies, other animals that thrive from the garbage in and around the containers include rats and stray dogs. They have tremendous potential to spread the germs of many dreadful diseases in human population.

Apart from these animals, the rag pickers keep on visiting such garbage heaps frequently to retrieve the useful and saleable materials, article from it so that they can earn their daily bread and butter. These rag pickers are at very high risk of getting infected, and injured while handling sharp objects like broken glass bottle or sharp metallic objects. Such heaps of garbage are major sources of air pollution, which causes various respiratory diseases and other adverse health effects as contaminants are absorbed from lungs into other parts of the body.

The toxic substances in air contaminated by waste include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. In everyday life we identify the polluted air especially through bad odors, which are usually caused by decomposing and liquid waste items that are part of such garbage heaps.

All in all, such heaps of garbage strewn on the roadside in various parts of the city has become an eyesore for the passersby and people living in the area.

(The writer is an environment specialist. Views personal.)

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