Labour unrest: Can India turn an energy shock into a wage-led economic growth impulse?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The Strait of Hormuz chokehold inflames oil prices and causes jitters in India. In a seeming upturn, the Iranian ambassador to India met journalists on 13 April to say there is continual engagement with the Indian government. He is also reported to have said no Indian ships had been charged for passage through the strait.

That comfort disappeared on 18 April when two Indian tankers were fired at during passage through the strait by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran. An earlier tanker had gone through successfully, suggesting a fragmented command structure. The need of the hour, easier said than done, is to identify and engage with those multiple power nodes to achieve a synchronized policy towards Indian tankers.

Meanwhile, worker unrest had been gathering force in the industrial outskirts of Delhi, which turned violent on 13 April. In a not-unrelated development, India’s inflation rate for March released that evening printed at 3.4%. Only a slight uptick for sure, from 3.2% in February.

But as a weighted average, it glossed over the ballooning price of cooking gas in March after the outbreak of hostilities in West Asia on 28 February.Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in standard cylinders of 14.5kg by weight is sold to registered customers at an administered price, which has been hiked only by ₹60 to ₹913. But industrial workers are typically migrants without a registered connection. In the informal market, where smaller cylinders of 2kg or 5kg capacity can be refilled, there is a price carnival.This is no criticism of the new Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is well structured (refer to my Mint piece of 3 April), but when cooking gas goes up in price anywhere from five