Despite decline in the prices of key vegetables such as onion and potato, food inflation rose marginally during the week ended March 20 to 16.35% mainly because of rise in prices of milk and pulses.
Food inflation had declined to a four-month low of 16.22% in the previous week.
The rise in food prices was mainly driven by pulses, which became dearer by 31.55% and milk prices rose by 18.74% on the yearly basis.
On weekly basis, the index for food articles rose by 0.6% due to higher prices of barley and milk (3% each), moong and condiments and spices (2% each), and urad and arhar (1% each).
However, the prices of tea (10%), fish-marine (2%) and wheat, fish-inland, masur and gram (1% each) declined.
Analysts say that the rabi yield would provide some relief to the government grappling with inflationary pressure as there is an anticipation of bumper wheat crop.
Besides the prices of onion and potato have also fallen sharply mainly because of huge output during rabi and late kharif seasons.
Meanwhile, the National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories (NFCSF) on Thursday said the country is estimated to have produced 16.7 million tonne of sugar in the first six months of 2009-10 season ending September, nearly 22% more than the output in the same period during the last season.
Though food inflation has been offlate showing a declining trend, it has not mirrored in the wholesale-price index based inflation.
Last month, the Reserve Bank of India has raised key short term lending and borrowing (repo and reverse repo) rates by 25 basis points to 5% and 3.5%, respectively, to control inflation from spreading to non-food items.
