Comparing inflation across states

Have you ever wondered which states see higher inflation in a particular period? For possibly the first time ever the government has released data on consumer price indices in various states in india via its open data platform data.gov.in (there are a lot of interesting data sets on that platform. Do check it out if you haven’t already). There is also another interesting data set on the same platform which gives the price indices of various commodities over the last ten years.

Coming back to consumer price inflation across states, let us first look at which states saw the highest and lowest Year-on-year inflation (year on year inflation is calculated by comparing prices in a particular month to the corresponding month of the previous year. This helps remove any distortions caused due to seasonality) in November 2013, the last month for which the data is available.

stateinflation

 

In November 2013, by far the highest inflation was seen in Tripura. Manipur, interestingly, is at the other end of the spectrum. Now, the problem with the above graphic is that it could be hard to search for a particular state, and see if there are any patterns to which states have higher inflation compared to others.

In order to examine if inflation varies by region, we draw a choropleth. In the below map, the more red a state has been coloured, the higher its inflation is, the greener a state is, the lower is its inflation. Middling states are coloured yellow.

Source: http://data.gov.in/dataset/state-level-consumer-price-index-ruralurban-upto-november-2013
Source: http://data.gov.in/dataset/state-level-consumer-price-index-ruralurban-upto-november-2013

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