Retail inflation down at 5.05% in August

The Dollar Business Bureau

India’s retail inflation slowed to 5.5% in August, the sharpest in over five months after recording 6% in July, thereby giving the Reserve Bank of India window to undertake policy rate cut in its upcoming monetary review later this year.

Food inflation went up 5.91% but vegetable inflation cooled down to 1.02% last month from a 14% sharp increase in July. 

The indices of industrial production for the mining, manufacturing and electricity, however, for July registered a negative growth of 0.8%, 3.4% and 1.6% over the corresponding period of last year. The cumulative growth of these three sectors during April-July 2016 stood at 2.0%, (-1.4) % and 7.1% respectively, over the corresponding period of last year.

In terms of industries, 12 out of the 22 industry groups in the manufacturing sector recorded negative growth in July 2016 as against the corresponding month of 2015.

The electrical machinery and apparatus sector registered the highest negative growth of 59.2%, followed by 16.8% in watches and clocks, and medical, precision & optical instruments and  16.2% in wearing apparel; dressing and dyeing of fur’.

Some manufacturing products such as tobacco products have shown the highest positive growth of 22.3%, followed by coke, refined petroleum products & nuclear fuel at 12.3% and radio, TV and communication equipment & apparatus at 10.9%.

The newly-elected RBI Governor Urjit Patel is set to chair his first bi-monetary policy meeting on October 4. The RBI had earlier set a target of 5% of retail inflation to be achieved by March 2017.