India Macro Insights

The policy and price indicators that move Indian markets: the policy repo rate, retail (CPI) and wholesale (WPI) inflation, quarterly real GDP growth and foreign exchange reserves. Each comes with its full history. Figures are the official readings for their period, apart from the derived values explained below.

The repo rate is the rate at which India's central bank lends to commercial banks against government securities, and it is the central bank's primary policy tool for controlling inflation and liquidity. Tapetide tracks the rate week by week and derives the change events — the first week at each new level — so you can see the full rate cycle rather than just today's number.

CPI (Consumer Price Index) measures the change in prices paid by households for a basket of retail goods and services, and it is the measure India's flexible inflation-targeting framework is set on. WPI (Wholesale Price Index) measures prices at the wholesale or producer level, before goods reach the retail consumer. WPI is more sensitive to commodity and fuel prices, so it is typically more volatile than CPI and the two can diverge sharply.

GDP growth here is the year-on-year change in real (constant-price) GDP for a given quarter versus the same quarter a year earlier. Constant prices strip out inflation, so the result reflects genuine output growth rather than price changes. A growth-rate series is not released directly, so the figure is derived from the constant-price GDP levels.

India's foreign exchange reserves have four components: foreign currency assets (by far the largest, held in currencies like the US dollar, euro and yen), gold, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) allocated by the IMF, and India's reserve position in the IMF. The composition is reported weekly in both US dollars and rupees; the rupee figure embeds the reference rate used that week.

CPI and WPI are released around the 12th of each month, quarterly GDP at the end of February, May, August and November, and forex reserves every Friday. The repo rate changes only at monetary policy meetings; its level is recorded every week. Tapetide checks for new releases daily and shows the exact latest period and its age for every series, so you can see at a glance whether a number is current.

Every figure is the official reading for its period, shown as released — none of it is estimated or modelled. Two kinds of value are derived: quarterly GDP growth, computed year on year from constant-price GDP levels, and year-on-year inflation for months where no ready figure is released, which the inflation charts mark month by month.

Yes, 12 months. A ready inflation figure is released only for the current CPI series. For the earlier months on the spliced back series, the year-on-year change is derived from the index.

No ready inflation figure is released for the wholesale index, so every month on the chart is a year-on-year change derived from the index. The index moved from a 2011-12 base year to a 2022-23 base. Each month's change is computed within a single base, so the inflation line is continuous even though index levels from the two bases are not directly comparable.

Age is counted in days from the period a figure describes, not the day it was collected. Each series has its own release calendar, so a monthly series is normally several weeks old even when it is fully up to date. A series is flagged overdue only once its age passes what its calendar allows.