Priya Deswella, a petite 35-year-old, is one of the unhappy shoppers that may just topple the Indian Government.

Yesterday she visited her local market in south Bombay to find that the cheapest “brown” rice was 19 rupees (22p) a kilogram, up from 16 rupees last week – a jarring 18 per cent rise. Exasperated, she left without buying anything. The shopkeeper warned her that prices are likely to rise again this weekend. Supplies are being strangled after Indian truckers went on strike, a protest against a recent surge in government-subsidised fuel prices, he said.

“The salesman was probably right, but I was so annoyed, I couldn’t buy,” said Mrs Deswalla, who earns 6,500 rupees (£76) a month. “Of course, I’ll have to go back. We must eat.”

Mrs Deswalla’s anger will send a chill through Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister. She blames neither the shopkeeper nor the truckers for the surge in inflation. She certainly is not fingering Opec. “The Government in Delhi, it makes these things happen,” she said.

To blame Mr Singh entirely seems unfair: a report published this week by Morgan Stanley notes that “close to three billion consumers are experiencing double-digit rates of price increases” and there is little Mr Singh can do about global oil prices.

However, Mr Singh’s pursuit of a controversial nuclear power deal with the US has angered his left-wing coalition partners, who have threatened to withdraw support and force a snap election. The Prime Minister could not choose a worse time to go to the polls: soaring inflation and a stock market collapse have left most Indians feeling poorer than they did at the turn of the year. The opposition parties are making political hay, with one labelling Mr Singh “an economic terrorist”.

Yesterday wholesale price inflation surged to 11.6 per cent, a 13-year high, as prices for goods from tea to steel increased. Sonal Varma, the Lehman Brothers economist, said: “The momentum in inflation continues to accelerate and that is a worrying sign.”

Analysts now expect India’s central bank to raise its repo rate – at which it lends short-term money to banks – by 0.5 percentage points, to 9 per cent.

After three years of explosive GDP growth, Mr Singh, an economist who led the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991, is getting used to disappointing data. India’s current account deficit nearly doubled last year on high oil prices. The rupee has fallen more than 8 per cent against the dollar this year. Foreign institutional investors made net sales of equities of nearly $6.5 billion (£3.3 billion) in the first half of 2008, the largest sell-off since the market was opened to them in 1993. Voters, as Mr Singh will be most acutely aware, are suffering.

Lalitha Vemula, who lives with her husband and five children in Bombay, says her finances are being stretched to the limit. Her husband earns 8,500 rupees a month as a driver. He usually brings in another 3,000 rupees in overtime. Most goes on school and college fees – an eyewatering 4,500 rupees a month – and a food bill that has swollen by 30 per cent, to about 6,000 rupees, since last year.

With little room for manoeuvre, the family will struggle if anything out of the ordinary occurs. When a neighbour’s daughter married recently, the groom was given a 300,000 rupee dowry and 100 grams of gold (worth about £1,500) by her family. Mrs Vemula has four daughters. Moreover, each of them is university material – and fees for good schools are rising.

Mounting pressure

3 billion: Number of consumers facing double-digit inflation

1 in 4: Number of countries fighting inflation of more than 10%, including six of the world's ten most populous countries

40%: The rise in global food prices in the year to February

50%: The rise in the price of oil this year

600%: The rise in the price of oil since 2002

Source: Morgan Stanley; World Bank; Times database

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