By Manoj Kumar and Shubham Batra
NEW DELHI, Feb 11 (Reuters) – India plans to revise the base year of key economic indicators, including consumer price index, gross domestic product and industrial output, every three to five years to better capture structural changes in the economy, a top official said on Wednesday.
A regular revision cycle will improve “user confidence by making the statistical system more responsive to economic change,” said Saurabh Garg, Secretary at the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), which releases retail inflation, GDP and industrial output data.
MoSPI plans to revise the GDP base year every five years and conduct the next household consumption survey after a three-year gap, Garg added.
The government is updating the base year for CPI data after more than a decade. The new series, based on the 2023/24 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey, is due to be released on Thursday.
The revised CPI basket expands to 358 weighted items from 299, with higher coverage of services and modern consumption, while adding rural house rent for the first time.
It will reflect shifts in spending patterns across food, housing and services, and will include back data and a linking factor to ensure continuity with the previous series, Garg said.
India’s annual retail inflation likely rose for a third straight month to 2.4% in January, according to a Reuters poll of economists, as firming food prices and higher gold and silver costs coincided with fading favourable base effects.
Food’s share in household spending has declined, with recent surveys showing it accounts for 39.7% of urban expenditure, down from about 43% in 2011-12. In rural areas, it accounts for 47%, down from 53%.
As part of methodology upgrades, the ministry has begun collecting prices from e-commerce and digital platforms, including Amazon and Swiggy, across 12 cities with populations above 2.5 million, Garg said.
Prices for airline tickets and OTT streaming services such as Netflix are also being added, he said.
(Reporting by Manoj Kumar and Shubham Batra; Editing by Janane Venkatraman)
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