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Softening food prices notwithstanding, the country's headline inflation rate has risen to 8.31 per cent in February, from the previous month's level of 8.23 per cent.
The higher year-on-year increase in the all-commodities wholesale price index (WPI) during February has come mainly on account of the ‘manufactured products' and ‘fuel & power' groups.
Manufacturing inflation
While manufacturing inflation has hardened from 3.75 per cent in January to 4.94 per cent in February, the same for ‘fuel & power' has gone up from 11.41 per cent to 11.49 per cent.
Primary articles
On the other hand, the ‘primary articles' inflation has eased from 17.28 per cent to 14.79 per cent, with the index for the group registering an absolute 2.9 per cent decline between January and February.
Within primary articles, ‘food articles' has shown a sharp dip in inflation rate from 15.65 per cent in January to 10.65 per cent in February, even as the index has fallen by 5.2 per cent on a successive month-to-month comparison. However, ‘non-food primary articles' have seen an increase in inflation rate, from 23.89 per cent to 29.80 per cent, mainly led by raw cotton (from 48.58 per cent to 80.16 per cent).
Overall rate
The overall average inflation rate for the first 11 months of the current fiscal works out to 9.32 per cent, which is more than the 2.98 per cent level for April-February 2009-10.
Even assuming no change in the WPI in March – and no revisions in the provisional indices for January and February – the fiscal as a whole would return an average inflation of 9.16 per cent, against 3.57 per cent for 2009-10.
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