Retail inflation climbs to 3.99%; High onion prices push CPI up

New Delhi, Oct 14: Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of Retail inflation, for the month of September 2019 stood at 3.99 percent which is higher than August 2019 when it stood at 3.28 percent.

Onion prices which spiked more than 200 percent was bound to have an impact on inflation and push it upwards. Onion has a weight of around 0.6 percent in the headline index itself and its contribution is around 10 percent to the vegetable basket.

Onion, as well as tomato prices, skyrocketed from Rs 7 per kg (Mumbai retail prices) in January to Rs 80 per kg in September this year owing to heavy rains which damaged crops and hindered supplies.

The surge in the staple prices may add at least 30 basis points (bps) to September's Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation, a Bloomberg survey showed before the CPI numbers were released by the government.

Consumer price index (CPI) based retail inflation had eased marginally to 3.15 per cent in July on the back of softening fuel and light prices. Retail inflation was 3.18 per cent in June 2019, while it stood at 4.17 per cent in year-ago period (July 2018). The overall food inflation, measured on consumer food price index (CPFI), moved up to 2.36 per cent during July from the revised 2.25 per cent print for June 2019, as per data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.