The Statistics Ministry will make public the weights of each item that will be part of the new Consumer Price Index (CPI) basket before the first retail inflation data is released on February 12.
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“Economists have asked for the weights to be provided before the inflation number comes, so that they can make their forecasts. So, the item weights will be released a week or so in advance,” a source said on the condition of anonymity. A second person aware of the matter said the weights of each item had been finalised apart from a few possible minor adjustments and were likely to be made public in the first week of February 2026.
The weights of various items in the CPI basket are key to how the headline inflation rate moves as that is the weighted average of the year-on-year change in price of each item. For instance, ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ together account for just 1.19 per cent of the CPI at present, but even this small weight has been more than enough for the rising prices of precious metals to comfortably drive inflation higher on their own. If one were to exclude gold and silver, CPI inflation in November — when it edged up to 0.71 per cent from October’s record low of 0.25 per cent — would have been (-)0.19 per cent.
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The current CPI inflation series, based on the 2011-12 household consumption basket, contains 299 items, ranging from house and garage rent — which accounts for 9.51042 per cent of the CPI basket — to stove and gas burners, which has a weight of 0.00001 per cent. The new CPI series, based on the results of the 2023-24 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES), will see the number of items rise by 65 to 364.
However, the number of new goods and services whose prices will determine the inflation rate will likely be greater than 65 as some items from the current CPI series are expected to be eliminated as they have become obsolete and aren’t really purchased by households anymore, such as the likes of VCD and DVD rentals and audio cassettes.
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The new inflation series will likely see a marked reduction in the weight of food items, which currently make up almost 46 per cent of the CPI basket. As per the latest HCES, rural households spent 47.04 per cent of their monthly per capita consumption expenditure on food in 2023-24, down from 52.9 per cent in 2011-12. For urban households, the share of food had fallen to 39.68 per cent from 42.62 per cent over the same time period. Reduction in the weight of food should reduce some volatility in the headline retail inflation rate.
Before the item weights are disclosed in early February 2026, the statistics ministry in January will release the classification structure of the various items and item categories. This structure, called Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose — or COICOP — is the international reference framework and is endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission. In the new series, MoSPI will move to the latest version of the framework, or COICOP 2018.
The current CPI series has six groups — ‘food and beverages’, ‘pan, tobacco and intoxicants’, ‘clothing and footwear’, ‘housing’, ‘fuel and light’, and ‘miscellaneous’ — and 23 sub-groups. This classification will undergo a change in the new series, which will have 12 divisions, under which there will be 43 groups.
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