Editor’s Note
The government has formed an 18-member task force to update the base year of the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) to 2022-23. The group, chaired by NITI Aayog’s Professor Ramesh Chand, has 18 months to submit its final report.
The central government has formed an 18-member task force, chaired by Professor Ramesh Chand of NITI Aayog, to update the base year of the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) to 2022-23. The task force, chaired by Professor Ramesh Chand, includes 17 other representatives from various government departments, economic advisory bodies, and non-official experts. The task force has been asked to submit its final report to the Office of the Economic Advisor within 18 months of the notification’s issuance.
According to an official release issued by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry on Thursday, the 18-member task force, chaired by NITI Aayog member Professor Ramesh Chand, includes representatives from various government departments, economic advisory bodies, and non-official experts. The annual inflation rate based on the Wholesale Price Index was 1.89 percent (provisional) in November 2024, while it was 2.36 percent in October and 1.91 percent in September.
The members of this group include representatives from the RBI, the Department of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Statistics, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Consumer Affairs, and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, which also includes SBI Group’s Chief Economist Soumya Kanti Ghosh. Non-official members include economists Surjit Bhalla, Shamika Ravi, Dharmakirti Joshi, Nilesh Shah, and Indranil Sengupta.
Earlier, the government had planned to revise the base year from 2011-12 to 2017-18. The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) had released a draft technical report of a task force in June 2021, which suggested revising the base year of the Wholesale Price Index and adding about 480 new items in the new series, such as medicinal plants, lifts, gym equipment, and some motorcycle engines.