India Consumer Price Index (OECD)

## What this measures

The level of consumer prices in India: the cost of a fixed basket of goods and services households buy, as an index, each month, all items, not seasonally adjusted. The OECD collects it from the national statistics office and publishes it on a common layout.

## Why it matters

It is the price level behind every inflation rate, and the base for comparing what money buys over time. Palanor computes the change from a year earlier (macro.oecd.cpi_yoy.ind) and the purchasing power of 100 since January 2019 (prices.purchasing_power_100_since_2019.ind) from it.

## How to read it

Read changes, not the level: the index is set to 100 in a base year, so its value only means something against another month of the same series. A rise of 5% between two months means the basket cost 5% more. Do not compare levels across countries; their base years and baskets differ.

## What it does not say

It is an average basket; a household's own inflation depends on what it buys and where it lives. It says nothing about exchange rates. Statistics offices rebase the index from time to time; when the OECD switches a country to a new dataflow, Palanor rewrites the whole series on the new base.

## Source

OECD, Consumer price indices (CPIs, HICPs): the COICOP 2018 dataflow (`OECD.SDD.TPS,DSD_PRICES_COICOP2018@DF_PRICES_C2018_ALL`) or, for countries the OECD has not yet moved to it, the COICOP 1999 dataflow (`OECD.SDD.TPS,DSD_PRICES@DF_PRICES_ALL`); key IND.M.N.CPI.IX._T.N._Z (monthly, national CPI, index, all items, not seasonally adjusted). Data Explorer: https://data-explorer.oecd.org. Palanor reads it every day and keeps one dataflow for the whole series. Source: OECD. Licence: CC BY 4.0; the OECD terms say "Except where additional restrictions apply as stated above, you can extract from, download, copy, adapt, print, distribute, share and embed Data for any purpose, even for commercial use."