The primary target for a long-term investor is to beat inflation - anything more is a bonus. The first difficulty for an Indian investor is that we don’t have reliable long-term indices for inflation. However, we do have prices for various goods that have remained in common usage across the past 40 years.
The retail price of petrol in December 1973 was Rs 1.65/litre. It's in the band of Rs 69-70 now, which works out to an inflation rate of about 10 per cent for fuel. The price of mutton in 1977 was Rs 10/kg, it's about Rs 375 in Delhi
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper