Consumer Price Index (CPI) considers consumer or retail prices of goods. Earlier, there were four major segments of CPI, namely for industrial, agricultural and rural labourers and urban non-manual employees (UNME) . However, since January 2011, only urban household and rural household-linked CPI is calculated by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
Base year for CPI is 2012. The number of items in CPI basket include 448 in rural and 460 in urban.
The Wholesale Price Index (WPI) was main index for measurement of inflation in India till April 2014 when RBI adopted new Consumer Price Index (CPI) (combined) i.e. CPI (rural) and CPI (urban) as the key measure of inflation.
Note-The RBI adopted consumer price-based inflation at 4% with a tolerance of ± 2% till March, 2021 under the monetary policy framework.