Call it impact on spending more time on digital screen, the retail inflation rate for spectacles has zoomed to 9.6 per cent in June, the highest in the current series. This, along with other items related with health care goods & services, have also recorded higher inflation in the said month.

However, doctor fees appears to have come down as indicated in the inflation rate. Experts say, higher expenditure on healthcare is affecting demand for other consumer items

According to a data sourced from the Consumer Price Indices Warehouse of Statistic Ministry, spectacle saw deflation during June to September last year but after that prices went up for next month, then down for a month and then from January this year, it is on the rise and finally in June, it touched 9.6 per cent – beating previous series high of 7.10 per cent of January 2016.

Lockdown effect

Considering people of all age group spending more time on mobile, tablets, laptop, desktop or even on TV during pandemic, it is obvious that the demand for spectacles will rise and that had the potential to push the price. This is clearly reflected in inflation rate trend.

The Warehouse has placed spectacle along with healthcare related goods & services for all India item inflation rates. These rates are updated every month along with retail inflation rate based on Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Healthcare related goods and services also include hospital and nursing home charges, medicine (non-institutional), family planning devices, other medical expenses (non-institutional), first consultation fee for doctor/surgeons (non-institutional) and X-ray/ECG/pathological test etc (non-institutional). Data for June showed that except for doctor fee, all goods & services recorded higher inflation.

‘No surprises’

Rumki Majumdar, Economist with Deloitte India does not see any surprise in prices of health-related items going up. The severity of the Covid second wave on lives and health probably have compelled households to spend more on healthcare and treatments.

“Inflation on essentials is likely to increase production costs and impact the purchasing power of the consumers. Risks of inflation can dent the broad-based demand recovery and even weigh on pent-up demand among those who have saved over the last 1.5 years and are eager to spend once the fear of contagion subsides,” she said.

Overall healthcare inflation has been nearly 1.75 per cent percentage points higher than the general inflation during the last six months.

Anil K Sood, Professor & Co-Founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Complex Choices (IASCC) said that the healthcare spending, particularly during the pandemic, is a non-discretionary spend.

“We do, therefore, expect it to adversely impact discretionary consumption in other areas, like purchase of durables, holidays, dining-out, etc. While the index weight for healthcare is just about 6 per cent of household consumption basket, the actual spending among families that have been impacted by the pandemic will be many times higher than 6 per cent, even among the high-income families. We can expect indebtedness to go up among the low- and middle-income households,” he said.

 

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