Today, the Reserve Bank released the results of November 2025 round of its bi-monthly Rural Consumer Confidence Survey (RCCS)^{1 2}. The survey collects current perceptions (vis-à-vis a year ago) and one year ahead expectations of households on general economic situation, employment scenario, overall price situation, own income and spending from the households residing in the rural and semi-urban areas across all Indian states and three major UTs. The survey also collates information on households' current perception and their year ahead expectation on inflation. The latest round of the survey was conducted during November 1-10, 2025, covering 8,754 responses.

Highlights:

1. Rural consumer confidence for the current period remained almost at the same level of the previous survey round. The Current Situation Index (CSI)³ remained range bound above the neutral line in the last three rounds (Chart 1; Table 9).

2. The one-year-ahead outlook, as captured by the Future Expectations Index (FEI), showed further improvement within the optimistic zone (Chart 1; Table 9).

3. The share of rural households anticipating decline in prices and inflation have increased for the current as well as year ahead in the latest survey round (Tables 3 and 4).

4. Households’ current perception of inflation declined significantly by 130 bps to 4.6 per cent in current round of the survey. Moreover, their expectation for the year ahead also reduced by 150 bps to 6.1 per cent (Table 12).

Note: Please see the excel file for time series data⁴

¹ The rural consumer confidence survey covers both rural and semi-urban areas.

² The survey results reflect the respondents’ views, which are not necessarily shared by the Reserve Bank. Results of the previous survey round were released on the Bank’s website on October 01, 2025.

³ CSI and FEI are compiled with the net responses on five survey parameters viz., general economic situation, employment, income, price level and spending, for the current period (as compared with one year ago) and a year ahead, respectively. CSI and FEI = 100 + Average of Net Responses of the above parameters.

⁴ Unit-level data for previous rounds of the survey are available on the Bank’s ‘Database on Indian Economy’ (DBIE) portal (weblink: https://data.rbi.org.in/DBIE/#/dbie/home) under the head ‘Unit-level Data’.

⁵ ‘Net response’ is the difference between the percentage of respondents reporting optimism and those reporting pessimisms. It ranges between -100 and 100. Any value greater than zero indicates expansion/ optimism and values less than zero indicate contraction/ pessimism.