The weekly wholesale price index (WPI)-based inflation data, widely tracked for the rate of price rise in food articles, will soon be a thing of past. It also provides figures on other primary articles (found in the raw form) and fuel and power.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs on Tuesday, in-principle, approved a proposal on releasing only monthly WPI data, to curb speculative movement in prices and give a holistic inflation picture.
A committee, comprising commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma, statistics and programme implementation minister Srikant Jena, besides officials of the two ministries, will work out the modalities for implementing the decision. However, inflation data for the week ended January 14 would be released on Friday, officials said.
The decision to go for monthly inflation numbers will make the frequency of the data on WPI indices in line with other inflation numbers. All other inflation numbers, be it based on the consumer price index (CPI) for rural labourers, the CPI for agricultural labourers, or the CPI for industrial workers, are released on a monthly basis. Even, the new CPI for the entire country, which is yet to give inflation numbers, is released monthly.
Earlier, the government used to come out with only weekly WPI inflation numbers, which included even manufactured products. From October 2010, it decided to shift to weekly inflation numbers and monthly inflation data.
While monthly data is comprehensive and gives headline inflation numbers, weekly inflation numbers give only primary and energy articles numbers.
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In September 2010, the government changed the base year for calculating WPI to 2004-05, from 1993-94. The new WPI series has 241 more items than in the old index. With the additional items, the WPI now measures 676 items, against 435 earlier.
While monthly figures will give a more holistic picture of inflation data, one would miss out some crucial points after scrapping of the weekly data. For example, if we take the December data, it shows food inflation stood at 0.74 per cent. It did not show food articles already witnessed deflation in the last two weeks of December.