Same-store retail spends across India climbed 9.6% year-on-year in August, up from 7.1% in July. That is the finding of the second edition of SANKET (Spends & Key Emerging Trends), the quarterly like-for-like tracker published jointly by the Retailers Association of India (RAI) and Innoviti. The report draws on more than 70 million transactions at over 100,000 checkout points, across 2,800-plus towns and 10,000-plus PIN codes. It is the strongest monthly reading since April, and it settles a question that had hung over Q1: whether the slowdown earlier this year reflected weakening demand or simply a run of bad timing. The August numbers say the latter.
The strength is not confined to one category or one region. Grocery & General Retail led the field at 9.9%, up from 7.5% in July. Fashion & Lifestyle turned around sharply, from 4.5% to 8.5%, the biggest swing of any category this quarter. Jewellery & Accessories climbed to 8.4%, its best reading since April’s Akshaya Tritiya spike. Consumer Electronics was the outlier, holding flat at 5.0% — a category still working through the drag of a weak rupee on import costs, even as festive demand starts to build. Geographically, the West (10.7%) and South (9.7%) kept their lead, but the North posted the sharpest single-month rebound of any zone, up 3.0 percentage points from July.
“These numbers tell us business is promising right now, and the recovery is genuinely encouraging — it’s broad enough to trust, not a one-category story,” said Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO, Retailers Association of India. “August is really a precursor to the festive season, and if this pace holds, retailers have good reason to plan with confidence heading into it. At the same time, we’re keeping an eye on the global turmoil. India’s consumption story stands on its own, but no market runs in isolation, and it pays to stay cautious even while the data looks good.”
“The payments data underneath these numbers tells its own story. UPI’s pulling further ahead of cards in almost every category we track, and that shift is happening at the point of sale, transaction by transaction, not in a survey. For us, that’s the value of SANKET — it turns raw payment flows into a read on where real demand is moving, month by month, well before the broader retail data catches up,” said Rajeev Agrawal, Founder and CEO, Innoviti Technologies.
The report’s most persistent trend, though, comes from outside the metros. Tier 3 towns grew 11.9% in August against 7.6% in Tier 1 cities — a gap that had briefly narrowed in July but has now widened to 4.3 percentage points, wider than even June’s peak. Because SANKET measures like-for-like spend at the same stores year-on-year, this isn’t a story about retailers opening more outlets in smaller towns. It’s a story about the same stores in those towns simply selling more. Tier 2 cities are where Jewellery and Fashion are finding their sharpest growth, at 11.6% and 13.0% respectively, as value-format retail and mid-city discretionary spending both pick up.
Payments data in the report shows UPI pulling further ahead of cards. UPI-linked same-store spend grew 22.6% year-on-year in August against 0.4% for cards. Card growth, such as it is, sits almost entirely within Jewellery, where larger gold ticket sizes still favour card payments. Strip Jewellery out of the picture, and cards would have contracted for the month.
