What is India’s current inflation rate?
Well, which India are you talking about? Are you talking about people like you and I, consumers? Or are you talking about big fat factories and how their costs are going up? Which kind of consumers? Those who live in the cities, or those who live in the villages? So complicated is our country, it turns out, that we don’t report just one inflation number. But the two that we tend to report and focus upon the most are the ones that I’ll be discussing here.
First: WPI, or the Wholesale Price Index. On the page that’ll open if you click on that link, click open the link for the WPI Press Release, and in the PDF, look out for the “annual rate of inflation”. At the time this post was written, inflation was at 0.79% for the month of May. In English, what that means is prices of commodities that are typically used in production were 0.79% more in May 2016 than they were in May 2015.
What about us consumers? Well in this case India reports the Consumer Price Index. On this website, on the left hand side, choose Annual Inflation Rates (Base: 2012, Current Series).
At the time of writing this post, information up to the month of May, 2016 was available. If you mirror on the website everything as shown above, you should get the lastest values for CPI in India.
So inflation in India for the month of May was at 5.76%. That is, prices for goods that consumers tend to purchase were 5.76% more in May 2016 than they were in May 2015. Urban consumers, as you can see, were slightly better off compared to rural consumers, in the sense that inflation was higher in the rural areas.
The idea was to show you where to go if you want to find out for yourself about how inflation in India is reported. We’d encourage you to play around with both of these websites, and try and make sense of the data, and get more familiar with it.
As we discussed in the previous post, though, always keep in mind that measuring inflation is a very complicated, and therefore very approximate task. Some things were way more expensive in May 2016 compared to May 2015 (think tomatoes) while some were actually a little cheaper (last year’s cellphones, for example). The reported number is an average.
And that’s inflation where India is concerned.
EconForEverybody 