The price at the factory gate.

The Office of the Economic Adviser has moved the index to a new base year, 2022–23. The new basket is larger, 953 items against 697, and it is weighted to the economy of 2022–23 rather than 2011–12. Crude petroleum and natural gas has also moved, from primary articles into fuel and power, so the parts of the two indices are not like for like.

The blue line is the new index; the grey line is the old one, which the OEA stopped after April 2026. Each year-on-year figure is computed inside its own base, from that base's own levels. Where both lines exist, they read the same months with two different rulers. The gap between them is the new basket at work, not an error, and it is why we never join the two into one number.

The wholesale index has been rebuilt three times since 1994, each time with a bigger basket weighted to a newer economy: 437 items on the 1993–94 base, 676 on 2004–05, 697 on 2011–12 and 953 on 2022–23. Each colour is one basket. Where two colours run over the same months, they are two rulers measuring the same economy, and their small disagreement is the difference between the baskets.

Watch the grey line that barely ripples: that is two-thirds of the economy's goods. Then watch the dark one, primary articles, which swings through double digits in both directions. The blue headline is their weighted truce: it always ends up nearer the calm line than the wild one, which is precisely what the weights mean.

Notice 2023: the headline spent seven months below zero while consumer inflation ran above five. Nothing was broken. Wholesale goods were retracing the commodity spike while retail services kept climbing: the two indices were measuring different terrain and both were right.

This is the most violent line in Indian price statistics: a 51 per cent peak in June 2022, a 23 per cent trough in the same cycle, and everything in between. It answers to global crude, to administered electricity tariffs, and to the arithmetic of the year-ago denominator, usually in that order of volume.

If the fuel line is the weather, this is the climate: metals, chemicals, textiles, machinery: the processed bulk of the goods economy. It lives in a narrow band, and when it leaves the band, as in 2021–22, the cause is imported: input costs arriving from the two volatile groups with a lag of a few months.

Each panel is one group on its own clock, drawn to an axis it shares with its class. Stop reading lines and start reading rows: when wholesale inflation moves, the commodity rim, the panels on the wide axis, does the moving, and the manufactured mass below barely registers. A flat panel is not a failed chart. It is the finding.

The two axes are a concession, not a trick. Crude petroleum has swung through 130 points of y/y in a decade; beverages through four. One shared scale would iron twenty-two panels flat and tell you nothing. So the split is disclosed, and each class stays comparable within itself.

This is where "inflation" stops being one number. The wholesale index is an average of averages, and every sub-group here is somebody's entire cost sheet: the rope-maker does not live the headline, only the price of rope. In any given month the spread across these 134 series runs to tens of points; the headline sits somewhere in the middle and describes almost no one exactly.

Thirty rows are shown; the field is 134. The rows in between are quieter, which is why they live in the CSV rather than on the page: a table of everything is a table of nothing.

This is the finest grain wholesale prices are published at: the level where "inflation" stops being a number and becomes onions, HR coils and jet fuel. Everything above this table is an average of something; these are the goods themselves, 697 of them, each with its own index and its own weather. And the deeper you go, the wider the field: sub-groups spread across tens of points in a month, items across hundreds.

The lineage under each name is the path back up the tree, so a hot row can be traced to the aggregate it feeds. Thirty rows are shown; the rest are quieter, and they ship complete in the CSV.

A tomato is sold at least twice: once in the mandi, once at the cart. The wholesale index records the first sale, the consumer index the second. The two baskets differ (the WPI food index has no restaurant meals; the CPI has no sugar sold to factories), and the retail price adds transport, rent and the shopkeeper's margin, which move slowly. So the retail line tracks the wholesale one without matching it point for point; the plate measures how closely, and with what delay.

This is the link people mean when they say wholesale prices "pass through" to the shop. It is real for food. For manufactured goods the pass-through is weaker and slower, which is why a fall in the headline WPI rarely shows up as cheaper goods on the shelf.