NEW DELHI: In a bid to make the official retail inflation data more updated, the government is planning to effect major changes to the way the data is captured and measured. As part of the overhaul, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) will source data directly from e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart.
Speaking to this newspaper, MoSPI Secretary Saurabh Garg confirmed that the ministry will track prices from e-commerce platforms across 12 cities. He said the cities would be chosen on a random sampling basis. “Our effort is to collect data in a way that better represents the economy today,” he said.
Meanwhile, a Reuters report said the ministry plans to scrape prices from e-commerce sites in 12 cities with populations above 2.5 million. According to the report, e-commerce firms were told to share weekly average prices of goods with the government. These figures would be cross-checked against a broader dataset to guard against distortions.
The objective is to build a more robust system for tracking retail inflation, given the rising share of e-commerce in household consumption.
The government will also revise the base years. CPI’s base year will shift to 2023–24, while the GDP’s will be updated to 2022–23. Currently, both the GDP and CPI are calculated using 2011–12 as base year.
The CPI product basket is also set for expansion and rebalancing. The number of items tracked will go up from 300 to 400.