The Wholesale Price Index, or WPI, measures the change in prices of goods that wholesale businesses sell to and trade in bulk with other companies. Unlike the CPI, which tracks prices of goods and services purchased by consumers, WPI tracks factory gate prices before retail prices.
In the preceding month, India's WPI-based inflation came in at -1.21%.
"We were expecting a deflation of around 0.6% or so. This is a little bit narrower than that. We may be very close to a break even by next month, and then going into a small year-on-year inflation in Q4. Broadly, if we look at the cues, we've had the rupee depreciation being one of the factors that the landed prices of commodities would be on the higher side. And even the commodity prices themselves have gone up. In some cases, crude, of course, has eased over the last couple of months, but other industrial commodities have seen a slight hardening. Food inflation is a smaller component of the WPI than it is of the CPI, but we have seen some hardening in vegetable prices as well, and that is something that we would track for the month of December," says
The Ministry of Commerce and Industry releases the WPI. Under the index, commodities are categorised into three groups — primary articles (which are further divided into food and non-food articles), fuel and power and manufactured products, and the base year for the index is 2011-12.
The prices of minerals (4.5%), food articles (2.5%), non-food articles (1.28%) and electricity (6.7%) increased in November 2025 as compared to October 2025. On the other hand, prices of crude petroleum and natural gas (-1.62%) decreased as compared to the preceding month. The price of coal remained unchanged.
Out of the 22 National Industrial Classification (NIC) two-digit groups for manufactured products, 14 groups witnessed a decrease in prices, whereas seven groups witnessed an increase. One group witnessed no change in prices.
Manufacture of fabricated metal products, except machinery and equipment, food products, other non-metallic mineral products, computer, electronic and optical products and chemicals and chemical products, etc, witnessed a month-over-month decrease in prices. The manufacture of fabricated metal products (except machinery and equipment), food products, other non-metallic mineral products, computer, electronic and optical products and chemicals and chemical products, etc, reported an increase in prices.
