Inflation moves up to 3.42%

Breaking the downward trend, inflation, based on the wholesale price index (WPI), increased to 3.42% for the week ended September 22, as compared to 3.23% in the previous week. Inflation during the same week in 2006 was recorded at 5.43%.

The government also revised inflation for the week ended July 28 to 4.70% as against 4.45% reported earlier.

The latest spike in inflation is due to increase in prices of manufactured products, which has a 63.75% weightage in the WPI basket. Prices of food products like salt and oil rose during the week. Index for chemical products rose by 0.3% whereas indices of non-metallic mineral products and metal products increased by 0.1% and 1.6% respectively over the previous week.

However, prices of food articles like urad, gram, condiments and spices declined.

Index for the fuel group remained unchanged during the week.