The government has set up a working group to revise the Wholesale Price Index base year to 2022-23 from 2011-12 and bring it in line with other economic data.
The Niti Aayog member Ramesh Chand-led working group will also recommend changes to the price collection mechanism and computational methodology.
The 18-member group will have nominees from the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, DPIIT, consumer affairs, economic affairs and the RBI. It shall also have Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economist of the SBI Group, noted economist Surjit Bhalla, and prime minister’s economic advisory council member Shamika Ravi.
Crisil chief economist DK Joshi, Kotak Mahindra Asset Management MD Nilesh Shah, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch economist Indranil Sengupta will also be members of the group.
The committee will lay a roadmap for the transition to the Producer Price Index series from the current WPI. “It will examine the methodology for compilation of PPI approved by the Technical Advisory Committee on Statistics of Prices & Cost of Living and suggest further improvement in compilation and presentation and recommend a roadmap for the switch over from WPI to PPI,” said the government.
The working group will submit its report within 18 months.
Aligned together
The WPI revision is expected to align the index which captures wholesale inflation, primarily focusing on manufactured products, with CPI and GDP revisions.
Moneycontrol had earlier reported that the new CPI and GDP revisions will be available from February 2026.
The government is also weighing a revision in the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), using 2022-23 as the base year.
The process for CPI revision is already underway with the government using 2022-23 as base year for weights and 2024 as the year to determine the prices.
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