The Government has approved the revision of the base year of the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) from 2011-12 to 2022-23 and will introduce a new set of Producer Price Indices (PPIs), marking a major update in India’s price measurement framework.
The revised WPI series and the new PPIs will be released by the Office of Economic Adviser under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) on June 15 at 12 noon. The new WPI series will replace the existing 2011-12 base year index.
Alongside the revised WPI, the government will release the Output Producer Price Index (OPPI), Trial Input Producer Price Index (IPPI), and Service Producer Price Index (Service PPI) for seven service sectors, including banking, securities transactions, insurance, pension fund management, railways, air passenger transport and telecom.
The move follows approval by the competent authority and recommendations of the Technical Advisory Committee on Statistics of Price and Cost of Living, which were subsequently presented before the National Statistical Commission.
According to the government, the transition from WPI to PPI aligns India’s statistical framework with international best practices and recommendations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To facilitate a smooth transition, both WPI and PPI will be released simultaneously for five years before the WPI is phased out.
The revised WPI series introduces several structural and methodological improvements. The number of items covered under the index has increased from 697 to 957, providing broader representation of economic activity.
For the first time, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power have been included under the electricity category. Nuclear electricity has also been added to the index basket, reflecting changes in India’s energy landscape.
Another major change is the reclassification of crude petroleum and natural gas from the Primary Articles group to the Fuel and Power category. The government said this would create a more coherent framework for tracking energy prices by grouping major fuel sources together.
The revised series also adopts Gross Value of Output (GVO) as the basis for assigning weights to commodities, replacing the earlier net traded value approach. According to officials, the new methodology better reflects the economic importance of commodities from a producer’s perspective.
Further improvements include the adoption of a chain-based method for compiling elementary indices and the use of a targeted mean imputation technique for handling missing price data, replacing the carry-forward method used in the existing series.
The revised WPI and Output PPI will be released on a monthly basis, with data for May 2026 and a back series covering April 2023 to April 2026. The Trial Input PPI for the manufacturing sector will also be published monthly on an experimental basis from March 2026 onwards to enable assessment of data quality and stakeholder feedback.
Meanwhile, the Service PPI will be released quarterly, beginning with provisional estimates for the fourth quarter of 2025-26, along with back series data from the first quarter of 2023-24.
