MUMBAI, Aug. 27 -- The village kirana stores are restocking faster than they were six months ago. That is the signal the Nifty FMCG index has been waiting for since inflation punished rural discretionary spending through FY25, and it is the reason the index held its ground in the three sessions after Jerome Powell's Jackson Hole address while more volatile segments of the market gyrated on rate-cut arithmetic.

The Nifty FMCG index gained a modest 0.4% in those sessions - unremarkable against the Nifty Midcap 150's 2.1% surge. But FMCG's role in this market is not momentum leadership. It is the answer to a different question: if rate cuts materialise, how quickly does the rural consumer recover enough spending power to drive volume growth...