India’s revamped consumer inflation index (CPI), which has updated the base year to 2024, addresses concerns flagged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over the integrity and representativeness of the country’s official statistics, according to Saurabh Garg, secretary at the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi).
Last year, the IMF had assigned a ‘C’ grade to India’s national accounts quality, citing methodological gaps including reliance on an outdated base year (2012).
“We have fundamentally changed the nature of the classification that we use. We’ve increased the markets, items and we’ve added e-commerce online markets,” said Garg, secretary at the Mospi, in an interview with Bloomberg TV.
The statistics ministry on Thursday released the first set of inflation data under the revised CPI series with 2024 as the base year, and retail inflation for January 2026 was estimated at 2.75 per cent over January 2025. Food inflation, which contributed to significant volatility in the CPI 2012 series, has been assigned a lower weightage in the new series. The CPI 2024 series also adopts the UN’s Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) 2018, which is expected to bolster global comparability.
The overhaul reflects India’s rapid digitisation over the past decade, which has enabled the government to access more real-time data from online and e-commerce platforms.
“I am confident that we will continue to be among the best in terms of the methods we use to collect data,” he said.
Mospi has also said that it plans to institutionalise base revisions at regular intervals according to global practices, every three to five years, depending on the availability of Household Consumption Expenditure Survey data.
However, SBI Research has flagged that even as the CPI has increased coverage geographically, there is a skewness in the selection of new markets for CPI coverage.
“Overall, 565 more markets (both rural plus urban) have been included in CPI-2024 as compared with CPI-2012. However, out of 565 new markets, only two states (UP and Maharashtra) accounted for a 43 per cent share. This indicates that inclusion of new markets is skewed and tilted more towards certain states,” it said.
The government is expected to release a new series of gross domestic product (GDP) estimates later this month, adopting 2022–23 as the base year.
The updated GDP framework will include new industries and draw on a wider set of administrative data sources, including the GST network and the Public Financial Management System. “We are ensuring that we become much more representative and using the latest technologies,” Garg said.