Govt to monitor prices of 16 more commodities
The Department of Consumer Affairs will expand its price monitoring to include 16 additional commodities such as brinjal, eggs, bananas, and spices. This increases the total number of tracked commodities to 38, covering 31% of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) weight. The goal is to stabilize price volatility and manage inflation more effectively. Current monitoring includes staples like rice, wheat, and edible oils, with data collected from 550 centers across 34 states and union territories.
To expand tracking of retail and wholesale prices of a broad range of commodities, the department of consumer affairs will collect and monitor daily movement of wholesale and retail prices of 16 additional commodities, including brinjal, eggs, banana, spices besides the existing 22 commodities, including rice, wheat, pulses, edible oil and onion.
“By adding commodities spices, including cumin seeds and black pepper, banana, brinjal, eggs, butter and bajra into price monitoring, we have included the entire range of commodities consumed in the country,” an official said.
Food items which have been added to the list of those being monitored daily are bajra, jowar , ragi, suji (wheat), maida (wheat), besan, ghee, butter (pasteurised), brinjal, egg, black pepper, coriander, cumin seed, red chillies, turmeric powder, and banana.
With the addition of commodities in price monitoring, the consumer affairs ministry from Thursday will track prices of 38 commodities which have 31% weightage in the consumer price index (CPI).
“The increase in coverage of food items under daily price monitoring will play a crucial role in policy interventions to stabilise price volatility in food items and to control the overall inflation,” according to an official statement.
The government was earlier monitoring 22 commodities — rice, wheat, atta, gram dal, tur (arhar) dal, urad dal, moong dal, masur dal, sugar, gur, groundnut oil, mustard oil, vanaspati,
sunflower oil, soya oil, palm oil, tea, milk, potato, onion, tomato and salt.
The consumer affairs department has been monitoring the daily prices of 22 essential food commodities from 550 centres across 34 states and union territories and provides advance inputs to the government, RBI and analysts regarding the CPI inflation.
Source Link : https://www.financialexpress.com/market/govt-to-monitor-prices-of-16-more-commodities-3571537/
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