The government’s chief economic advisor, Mr Kaushik Basu, said on Tuesday that inflation would decline to below 8 per cent in April, from 8.98 per cent reported in the previous month.
“I would expect inflation to be less than 8 per cent in April,” he told reporters on the sidelines of an Assocham function.
He further said the inter ministerial group (IMG) on inflation, constituted by the Government to suggest measures to control spiralling prices, will meet next month after the RBI’s annual monetary policy review on May 3.
“We will have an important IMG meeting in early May. We want to look at macro economic demand management,” he said, adding that RBI Governor, Mr D Subbarao, might also attend the meeting.
The government had set up the IMG on inflation in February, to suggest measures to control spiralling prices, particularly of food articles.
Economists expect that the central bank may go for another round of hike in key policy rates to control the inflation, which is still way above the comfort level.
Mr Basu said the Government would have to come out with new measures to control inflation amid high global commodity prices and the policy followed by several economies of making available large cash flow into market.
“We will have to go on the drafting board and think in terms of measures that we can take. Some of them have to be quite different from the measures we are used to because this is a new kind of inflation,” he said.
He said earlier the policy makers did not use to look at the rest of the world while deciding on measures to control inflation. “(But) now we are doing so,” he said.