The Breakdown
The subsidy ended this week, after years of governments promising to remove it and then not removing it. Pump prices moved the same night.
The immediate effect is on anybody who drives for a living. That group feels it first and hardest, because fuel is not a line item they can cut. The second wave lands on food prices, because transport costs get passed along, and historically that shows up within about a month.
The government has announced a set of transfers intended to cushion the change. Whether those reach people quickly enough is the entire question, and it is the same question that was asked the last two times this was attempted.
What is genuinely different this time is that the removal was not reversed within a week under pressure. That has happened before. It has not happened yet here.