Unravelling Food Basket of Indian Households: Revisiting Underlying Changes and Future Food Demand

Abstract

The study empirically revealed striking difference in the consumption pattern of Indian households across rural and urban sectors, geographical regions and income categories. The findings were in conformity with Engel’s law and Bennett’s law of consumption. Expenditure elasticities of food commodities were estimated using LA-AIDS demand system and food demand was projected for the year 2020. The expenditure elasticities of high value agricultural commodities (HVACs) like milk, nonvegetarian products, fruits, etc. were higher than staple food, i.e., cereals. Further, wide inter-regional variations in the household demand for food commodities necessitates to match the demand and supply at disaggregate level and to remove the bottlenecks in production of food commodities in the respective region to fulfil the demand.