As food prices cooled off, India’s retail inflation rate dropped to 5.5 percent in November from a 14-month high of 6.2 percent the month before.
Compared to 10.9 percent in October, food inflation decreased to 9 percent for the month.
For the third consecutive month, consumer prices have stayed over 5%. At its December meeting, the monetary policy committee voted to keep the policy rate unchanged for the eleventh straight time, citing high inflation as one of the reasons.
The RBI changed its inflation projection by 0.3 percentage points to 4.8 percent from the initial 4.5 percent estimate due to the unusually high November print. Consumer inflation in India is probably going to continue to decline after January.
According to the Asian Development Bank’s most recent economic projection, inflation would drop even more to 4.3 percent in FY26 from 4.5 percent in the September edition.
In the February meeting, experts had been projecting a 25 basis point rate drop to accompany the softening of consumer prices.
