India's industrial output growth slips to 2.7% in March; retail inflation declines to 2.99% in April

New Delhi: Industrial output growth slipped to 2.7 percent in March, chiefly because of poor performance of the manufacturing sector, showed the IIP data based on the revised base year of 2011-12.

The index of industrial production (IIP) growth was 5.5 percent in March 2016. For 2016-17, factory output grew by 5 per cent as against 3.4 percent in the year-ago period.

On the other hand, IIP growth based on the old series (2004-05 base year) was 2.5 percent in March compared to 0.3 percent a year ago. Similarly, the figure for 2016-17 was 0.7 percent as against 2.4 percent in the previous fiscal.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) revises the base year of the macroeconomic indicators, as a regular exercise, to capture structural changes in the economy and improve the quality and representativeness of the indices.

Retail inflation fell sharply to 2.99 percent in April, from 3.89 percent in March, due to lower cost of food items, including pulses and vegetables that showed a deflationary trend.

The consumer price index (CPI) based retail inflation for March 2017 was revised slightly upwards to 3.89 percent, from 3.81 percent recorded previously. CPI inflation stood at 5.47 percent in April 2016.

Inflation based on the wholesale price index slipped to a four-month low of 3.85 percent in April as both food articles and manufactured items showed cooling in prices. The government today came out with the new series of wholesale inflation and industrial output data under which the the base year for calculating the macroeconomic indicators has been revised to 2011-12, from the 2004-05 earlier.