Page 540 - ES 2020-21_Volume-1-2 [28-01-21]

Prices and Inflation 167

these index numbers are utilized for fixing/revising wages, regulating the dearness allowances
paid to large number of manual workers and Central/ State Govt. employees. To capture the
latest consumption pattern of working-class family, Labour Bureau has revised the base year
of the existing CPI-IW series 2001=100 to a more recent base year 2016=100.
The new series of CPI-IW covers the industrial workers from the existing seven sectors viz.
Factories, Mines, Plantation, Railways, Public Motor Transport Undertakings, Electricity
Generating & Distributing Establishments and Ports & Docks. The new series has a wider
coverage in terms of sample size, number of centres, markets/outlets, items etc. The major
changes in the new series are summarized in the following Table.
Refinements in CPI-IW base updation 2016

old series New series
Base 2001=100 2016=100
Coverage of States/UTs 25 28
Coverage of Centres 78 88
Coverage of Markets 289 317
Working Class families covered in the base year survey 41040 48384
Number of Items 392 463
Compilation of Indices Arithmetic Mean of Geometric
price relatives Mean of price
relatives
As recommended by Technical Advisory Committee on Statistics of Prices and Cost of Living
(TAC on SPCL), Labour Bureau has revised the classification of items in CPI-IW into different
Groups and Sub-Groups in line with NSO’s Classification of Individual Consumption by
Purpose (COICOP). The revised six groups based on the COICOP classification and their
respective weights for different series are as follows.
All India group weight distribution for different series of CPI-IW

Groups Weights (%)
1982 2001 2016
Food & Beverages* 57.0 46.2 39.17
Pan, Supari, Tobacco & Intoxicants 3.15 2.27 2.07
Fuel & Light 6.28 6.43 5.5
Housing 8.67 15.27 16.87
Clothing & Footwear** 8.54 6.57 6.08
Miscellaneous 16.36 23.26 30.31
General Index 100.00 100.00 100.00
*Food and Beverages was Food Group during previous series.
**Clothing and Footwear was Clothing, Bedding and Footwear during previous series.
The food & beverages group and the miscellaneous group have been further divided into
various sub-groups. The weights for the purpose of compilation of index numbers have been
derived on the basis of average monthly family expenditure. The average budget derived
from a family budget enquiry consisted of all items of expenditure reported by the families
surveyed under Working Class Family Income & Expenditure Survey (WCFI&ES), 2016.
The weight of food & beverages has declined over time whereas the weight of miscellaneous