India's food price inflation creeps up to 8.68 per cent

India's wholesale price inflation rate ended a four-week declining trend and firmed up to 8.69 per cent during the week ended 27 November 2020, up 0.09 percentage points from the previous week's low of 8.60 per cent.

The spike in the rate of inflation has been aided by an increase in the prices of essential food articles such as fish, meat, foodgrains, spices and some pulses.

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, however, expects the minor variations in the weekly estimates not to impact the overall declining trend in food price inflation, which remained single-digit at 9.97 per cent in October 2010.

Food price inflation in the country stood at 20.24 per cent during the corresponding period of the previous year.

Build-up of food price inflation so far during the financial year (beginning 1 April 2010) was 10.34 per cent against 22.99 per cent in the similar period of the previous year.

The index for the 'food articles' group rose 0.5 per cent to 181.4 (provisional) during the week ended 27 November 2010 from 180.5 (provisional) in the previous week due to higher prices of fish, condiments and spices (up 3 per cent each), barley, poultry chicken, jowar, bajra, wheat, mutton and moong (up 2 per cent each) and ragi, beef and buffalo meat and maize (up 1 per cent each). However, the prices of urad (down 4 per cent), masur (down 2 per cent) and egg and arhar (down 1 per cent each) declined.