NEW DELHI: India launched a new consumer price index on Friday aimed at measuring the cost of living across rural and urban areas as it battles to bring inflation under control.
Billed as the "common man" index, it will not replace India's main price measure, the Wholesale Price Index, but it will give the central bank an extra tool to assess rising costs that are fanning public anger.
Existing consumer price indices do not "reflect the true picture of price behaviour in the country" as they do not embrace all parts of the population, India's chief statistician T.C.A. Anant said ahead of the index's launch.
A national poll last weekend found inflation, stoked by soaring food prices, was beginning to "seriously hurt" family household budgets.
The new index showed consumer price inflation at six percent nationwide in January, more than two percentage points below the Wholesale Price Index, which measures a wider basket of goods such as machinery and basic metals.
The new index joins a series of separate consumer price indices for industrial workers, agricultural labourers, rural labourers and urban non-manual employees.
It will measure price rises in food, beverages and tobacco, fuel, housing, clothing, bedding and footwear and other goods.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described inflation as a "serious" threat to India's growth and the government has been racing to boost vegetable and other supplies to bring down food prices, the main driver of general inflation
Official data Thursday showed India's food inflation slipped to a two-month low of 11.05, helped by a large fall in vegetable prices.
The central bank, the most hawkish in Asia, has raised interest rates seven times in less than a year to wrestle inflation.
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