Two new monthly consumer price inflation series from Feb

The government today said it will come out with two more series on monthly consumer price inflation from the next month to reflect the impact of price rise on consumption pattern of households in urban and rural areas.

"CSO will be releasing CPI--urban and rural--indices for January onwards. The first data would be released sometime in February," Chief Statistician TCA Anant told PTI.

He said the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) is working on the indices and it would soon issue a statement on methodologies, among others, for calculating the indices.

Currently, there are four CPI inflation series--CPI for industrial workers, CPI for agricultural labourers, CPI for rural labourers and CPI for urban non-manual employees. Besides four CPI series, the wholesale prices are measured by WPI index.

The new indices assume importance since the current inflation rate is a concern for both the government and the RBI.

Even though inflation measured by movement in consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW) came down to 8.33 per cent in November from 9.7 per cent in the previous month, the wholesale price food inflation surged to a 10-week high of 14.44 per cent for the week ended December 18.

Overall, wholesale price inflation in November stood at 7.48 per cent, down from 8.58 per cent in the previous month.

Earlier, Anant had said the two new series--CPI urban and CPI rural--will be based on consumption pattern revealed in the National Sample Survey for urban and rural consumers.

"There are two series being generated. One is CPI-Urban and the other is CPI-Rural.

This basket of commodities is based on the pattern of consumption revealed in the National Sample Survey for urban and rural consumers," he had said, adding the base year of computation of the new CPI series will be 2004-05.