Retail inflation moved up to 5.11 percent in January month-on-month, measured on a new base year 2012, mainly due to dearer food items including fruits and vegetables.

In December, retail inflation based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was at 4.28 percent (recalculated with new base year). The CPI inflation in December was 5 percent with 2010 as base year.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has revised the base year to 2012 from 2010 for computing the consumer price index.

After releasing the new series on Thursday, Chief Statistician T C A Anant told reporters that “inflation in 2014-15 will be lower than the 2013-14 level”.

He further said that besides changes in weight of items and groups, “we have shifted to geometric mean for computing inflation from arithmetic mean used in previous series.”

Food inflation in January was 6.13 percent due to costlier fruits, vegetable and cereals.

The rate of price rise in egg contracted by 0.24 percent in January, while the same shot up to 9.38 percent in milk and related products.

The government also released Consumer Food Price Index (CFPI) which stood at 6.06 percent on annual basis.

Industrial prod growth slows to 1.7% in Dec

Industrial production growth rate slowed to 1.7 percent in December last year on sequential basis mainly due to a contraction in the mining and quarrying sector.

The growth in factory output, as measured by the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), in the month under review was, however, higher as compared to December, 2013 when it expanded by 0.1 percent.

The November IIP has been revised upwards to 3.9 percent from 3.8 percent. For the April-December period of 2014-15, IIP is 2.1 percent as against 0.1 percent in same period of the last fiscal.

As per government data released on Thursday, manufacturing output, which constitutes over 75 percent to the index, grew by 2.1 percent in December compared to a dip of 1.1 percent in the same month a year ago.

For April-December period, the sector saw an output growth of 1.2 percent, compared to a contraction 0.4 percent in the year-ago period.

Output in the mining sector contracted by 3.2 percent in December, compared to a growth of 2.6 percent in the same month last year.

During the April-December period, the output has grown by 1.7 percent compared to a contraction of 1.5 percent year-on-year.

The production of capital goods, a barometer of demand, grew by 4.1 percent in December as against a contraction of 2.5 percent in same month of last year.

During the April-December period, capital goods output grew by 4.8 percent as against a dip of 0.4 percent.

Thirteen out of the 22 industry groups in the manufacturing sector have shown positive growth during the month of December 2014 year-on-year.