New Delhi, May 14 (UNI): Primarily driven by high food and vegetable prices, India’s wholesale price index (WPI) based inflation rose to 1.26% year-on-year in April 2024 from 0.53% in the previous month, data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry showed on Tuesday.
The data showed that the rate of inflation based on the WPI Food Index increased from 4.65% in March 2024 to 5.52% in April 2024.
“Positive rate of inflation in April 2024 is primarily due to increase in prices of food articles, electricity, crude petroleum & natural gas, manufacture of food products, other manufacturing etc,” said an official release.
As per data released by the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI) on Monday this week, India’s retail inflation measured by the consumer price index (CPI) eased to 4.83% in April this year even as food inflation remained elevated primarily on account of pulses and vegetable prices staying firm.
The headline retail inflation has remained below the upper tolerance band of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for several months now. In light of the downward trend in retail inflation, the RBI has kept the policy repo rate unchanged. Retail inflation is one of the most important factors that is considered by the RBI while determining the key lending rate.
The WPI captures the average movement of wholesale prices of goods and is primarily used as a GDP (gross domestic product) deflator.
As per the latest data, the month-over-month change in the WPI index for April 2024 stood at 0.79% as compared to March 2024.
The data showed elevated inflation in the case of many kitchen and food items such as pulses, vegetables, onions and potatoes. The rate of year-on-year inflation in the case of onions in April this year was as much as 59% while that for potatoes was 71.97%.
