India's New CPI 2024 Series Boosts Global Credibility, Aligns with Urban Shift

The report from SBI Research said that under the old CPI 2012 classification, the share of food and beverages would have declined to 40.10 per cent, but in the new series it stands at 36.75 per cent.

The new CPI series with 90 per cent of the weights covered by 148 items is disproportionately covered and unevenly distributed, which is "extremely useful for inflation nowcasting, corporate pricing strategies and scenario analysis," the report said.

The report highlighted that the new series has appropriately incorporated the changing pattern in urbanisation, with Telangana, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Haryana becoming top states in terms of urbanisation trends over the last decade, when showing more than 10 per cent increases in weights.

"Interestingly, PDS beneficiaries mapped with States' food inflation rate and compared with earlier data reveal that the exclusion of PDS items is likely to have a positive bias on food inflation across states," the report mentioned.

In the new series, Telangana is the state which has the highest rate of inflation reflecting aftereffects of bifurcation of "erstwhile United Andhra Pradesh", it noted.

Except Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, all major states have overall inflation of less than 3 per cent in January 2026.

The new CPI series has increased the weightage of housing, water and transport, information and communication significantly in rural areas when compared to old series.

For urban areas, the weight of housing, water has reduced in new series along with food and beverages, it said.

The new series increases the number of weighted items to 358 from 299, covers 1,465 rural and 1,395 urban markets plus 12 online markets, and reduces the weight of food in the CPI basket to 40.1 per cent from 45.8 per cent.

Rural housing, online media/streaming services, value added dairy products, barley, pendrive and external hard disk, among others, have been included in the basket for CPI estimation.

- IANS