New Delhi

The revised Consumer Price Index (CPI) series has significantly expanded market coverage, but the inclusion of new markets is heavily skewed towards a few states, with Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra together accounting for 43 per cent of the additions, according to a report by State Bank of India.

The report said the CPI-2024 series has widened its geographical reach and item base, adding 565 new rural and urban markets compared to the CPI-2012 series. However, it noted that nearly half of these additional markets are concentrated in just two states, indicating an uneven distribution.

“This indicates that the inclusion of new markets is quite skewed and tilted more towards certain states,” the report said.

Alongside market expansion, the number of weighted items in the CPI basket has also risen. The 2024 series includes 358 weighted items, up from 299 earlier. The number of goods has increased from 259 to 314, while services have gone up from 40 to 50.

Newly added items include rural housing, online media and streaming services, value-added dairy products, barley and its products, pen drives and external hard disks, attendants, babysitters and exercise equipment.

Items considered obsolete — such as VCRs, VCD and DVD players, radios, tape recorders, second-hand clothing, audio-video cassettes and coir rope — have been removed from the basket.

The new CPI series has also introduced 12 online markets across cities with populations exceeding 25 lakh as per the 2011 Census, including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Surat, Pune, Jaipur, Lucknow and Kanpur. These online markets aim to track weekly price movements on e-commerce platforms.

However, the report pointed out that rapidly growing cities such as Indore, Patna, Nagpur, Bhopal and Thane have been excluded due to reliance on 2011 Census data.

On inflation trends, India’s CPI inflation stood at 2.75 per cent in January 2026, compared with 2.55 per cent under the old series using a linking factor. Rural inflation was recorded at 2.73 per cent, while urban inflation stood at 2.77 per cent. Food inflation was at 2.13 per cent.

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Core CPI inflation under the new series eased to 3.4 per cent in January 2026, compared with around 4.15 per cent under the old series. The report attributed much of this decline to the reduced weightage of gold, which fell to 0.62 per cent from 1.08 per cent earlier.