Explanation:

The Government periodically reviews and revises the base year of the macroeconomic indicators as a regular exercise to capture structural changes in the economy and improve the quality, coverage and representativeness of the indices. In this direction, the base year of All-India WPI has been revised from 2004-05 to 2011-12 by the Office of Economic Advisor (OEA), Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Ministry of Commerce and Industry to align it with the base year of other macroeconomic indicators like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Index of Industrial Production (IIP).
•Updated item basket and weighting structure conforming to the structure of economy in 2011-12.
New Features
•In the new series of WPI, prices used for compilation do not include indirect taxes in order to remove impact of fiscal policy. This is in consonance with international practices and will make the new WPI conceptually closer to ‘Producer Price Index’.
•A new “WPI Food Index” will be compiled to capture the rate of inflation in food items.
•Seasonality of fruits and vegetables has been updated to account for more months as these are now available for longer duration.
•Item level aggregates for new WPI are compiled using Geometric Mean (GM) following international best practice and as is currently used for compilation of All India CPI.
•A high level Technical Review Committee has been set up for the first time to carry out dynamic review process in order to keep pace with the changing structure of the economy.
Do you know?
•A new “Food Index” is being compiled combining the “Food Articles” under “Primary Articles” and “Food Products” under “Manufactured Products”. Together with the Consumer Food Price Index released by Central Statistics Office, this would help monitor the price situation of food items better.
THINK!
•CPI and IIP