The Labour and Employment Ministry on October 22, 2020 revised the base year of the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers (CPI-IW) from 2001 to 2016.
- The revision reflect the changing consumption pattern, giving more weightage to spending on health, education, recreation and other miscellaneous expenses, while reducing the weight of food and beverages.
- Apart from measuring inflation in retail prices, the CPI-IW is mainly used for determining dearness allowance (DA) paid to central/state government employees and workers in the industrial sectors besides fixation and revision of minimum wages in scheduled employments.
- Under the new series, the weightage for the food group has gone down to 39.17 per cent from 46.2 per cent in the 2001 series, while weight of miscellaneous items, like education and health has risen to 30.31 per cent from 23.26 per cent. The weight of housing and clothing and footwear have changed to 16.87 per cent from 15.27 per cent and to 6.08 per cent from 6.57 per cent.
- Weight of fuel and light segment will now have a weight of 5.5 per cent as against 6.43 per cent earlier, while pan, supari, tobacco and intoxicants will hold 2.07 per cent weight as against 2.27 per cent.
- In the new 2016 series, 88 centres have been covered as against 78 centres in the 2001 series.
(Source: Indian Express)
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