On October 7, the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) six-member Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted unanimously to raise the repo rate by 25 basis points (bps) to 5.5%. Further, four of the six were in favour of further tightening the screws and changing the stance of monetary policy from ‘neutral’ to ‘calibrated tightening’.

But there is another collective opinion that perhaps matters even more: whether inflation is spreading, or becoming ‘generalised’.

According to the minutes of the October 5-7 meeting of the MPC , released on Wednesday, four members voiced concerns about inflation spreading – or more and more items in a household’s consumption basket seeing higher price increases.…