Salient features of new CPI index (revised in 2015)

♤ The number of Groups, which was five in the old series, has now been increased to six. ‘Pan, tobacco and intoxicants’, which was a Sub-group under the earlier Group ‘Food, beverages and tobacco’, has now been kept as a separate Group. Accordingly, the Group ‘Food, beverages and tobacco’ has been renamed as ‘Food and beverages’.

♤ Egg, which was part of the Sub-group ‘Egg, fish and meat’ in the old series, has now been kept as a separate Sub-group. Accordingly, the earlier Sub-group has been modified as ‘Meat and fish’.

♤ Due to change in consumption pattern, few additional items appeared in the CPI basket.

♤ The elementary/item indices are now being computed using Geometric Mean (GM) of the

Price Relatives of Current Prices with respect to Base Prices of different CPI : Changes in the Revised Series markets in consonance with the international practice. In the old series, Arithmetic Mean (AM) was used for that purpose. The advantage of using GM is that it moderates the volatility of the indices as GM is less affected by extreme values.

♤ Sample size for collection of house rent data for compilation of House Rent Index has been doubled from 6,684 rented dwellings in the old series, to 13,368 rented dwellings in the revised series.