The Hindu : Business : Inflation drops further to 5.3 p.c.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Feb 05, 2005

Business

Business

Inflation drops further to 5.3 p.c.

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, FEB. 4. The Government's efforts in recent months to rein in inflation appear to be yielding dividends. Against the market expectation of about 5.5 per cent, the annual rate of inflation for the week ended January 22 touched a 34-week low at 5.37 per cent.

With the official wholesale price index (WPI) for all commodities dipping during the week by 0.1 percentage point to 188.4 from 188.6 according to provisional estimates, the inflation rate, calculated on a point-to-point basis, declined correspondingly to the new low from 5.42 per cent during the week ended January 15 and 6.24 per cent during the same week in the previous year.

According to official data released here today, contributing to the lower inflation rate by a large measure were the lower prices of fruits and vegetables, chicken and eggs, certain pulses, edible oils, manufactured products and fuel. In particular, the index for the primary articles group, which has a weight of 22.02 per cent, fell by 0.4 percentage point owing to about 1-3 percentage point fall in the prices of various edibles.

In the manufactured products group, which enjoys a weight of 63.75 per cent, the index declined by 0.1 percentage point under which the `food products' index decreased by one percentage point mainly on account of lower prices of gur and khandsari, rice bran oil and various other edible oils such as rapeseed and mustard, groundnut and vanaspati. The index for fuel also went down owing to lower prices of naphtha and furnace oil.

The WPI index and the inflation rate for the week could perhaps have been lower, but for the marginal increases in the prices of other commodities such as textiles, paper, rubber and plastic products, chemicals, machinery and machine tools and transport equipment.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business