Efforts to Control Sugar Price

August 29, 2026

These days are full of festivals in India. Today is the holy festival of Raksha Bandhan. After this, auspicious days will come from Dussehra, Diwali to Christmas and New Year. People in India celebrate these festivals with sweets and cakes, pastries etc. Sugar is an ingredient used in all sweets. Meanwhile, this year the production of sugarcane and sugar has decreased. The result is an imbalance in demand and supply. The situation is such that the price of sugar has suddenly increased to Rs 68 per kg. The rising price of sugar has spoiled the budget of the common man. The shopkeepers’ business started to decline. Seeing the diminishing charm of festivals, the government started making all-out efforts to control the price of sugar. The biggest effort among these is that the government has made full preparations for duty-free import. 10 lakh tonnes of raw sugar is being ordered. The news is that 4 consignments of 80 thousand tonnes have left for India from abroad. Apart from this, sugar mill owners were earlier ordered to keep a stock of 30 days, now it has been changed to 15 days. But realistically, the root cause remains unidentified. The point is hoarders. As soon as fears of bad weather and low yields grew, hoarders were quick to create artificial shortages. As always, supply was reduced relative to demand, leading to a massive price surge. Now, the government claims that its efforts have reduced prices by 12 to 15 rupees per kilogram. But again, India’s anomaly is that wholesale market prices are not reflected in retail markets. Where is this 12 to 15 rupee per kg reduction visible in the grocery markets? Sugar is available at the same price in the grocery stores. Even when price indexes indicated that wholesale prices were rising at zero or below, the retail prices were still rising sharply. Unfortunately for the common man, he has to make grocery purchases, which are expensive. The simple truth is that more measures should be taken to increase the supply of sugar, but to reduce prices in the grocery stores, the hoarding of hoarders should also be suppressed, otherwise the common man will continue to suffer the brunt of inflation even during these festive seasons.