India-China Relations- Faint New Breeze

prices in 1979-80, the Government of India's latest Economic Survey has sought to make out that only a handful of commodities were responsible for most of the price increase. According to the Economic Survey, "the behaviour of prices over the year as a whole can be characterised as follows; a handful of commodities experiencing particularly sharp price increases making a disappropriate contribution to overall increase in prices while other commodities showed a more moderate rate of inflation. Indeed, only nine items with a combined weight of about one-third in the overall index accounted for about 66 per cent of the total rise in prices". The nine items were rice, fruits and vegetables, sugar, khandsari and gur, oilseeds, edible oils, petroleum crude and natural, gas, mineral oils, coal mining, and iron, steel and ferro alloys. Between end-March 1979 and end-March 1980, these commodities experienced price increases ranging from 15 per cent to 98 per cent. On the other hand, on the same point-to- point basis, the increase in the prices of all other items, accounting for a weight of 63,45 per cent in the general index of wholesale prices, was 10.8 per cent, which works out to a 34.2 per cent contribution to the total increase in prices.