Several nights a week, Reema Kapoor visits her local street market in Goregaon, an outer suburb of Mumbai, on her way home from work to buy the ingredients for her evening meal.

Lately, that routine has been disrupted by rises in the prices of vegetables and other ingredients. Ms Kapoor, like millions of Indian shoppers, had grown to expect a seasonal slump in prices in a country short on cold storage as food keeps better in winter. But “prices are not coming down, they’re just going up”, she says.