Retail inflation scaled a 17-month peak of 5.69% in January, as food inflation rose to 6.85% last month, compared with 6.40% in December, showed the official data released on Friday. Separately, official data showed industrial output shrank for a second straight month, contracting 1.3% in December against a fall of 3.2% in the previous month when the index of industrial production (IIP) had dropped for the first time since October 2014.
Retail inflation had risen 5.61% in December.
In the IIP, manufacturing hit -2.4% in December, compared with -4.4% in the previous month. Mining rose 2.9% in December, against 2.3% in the previous month, while electricity production rose 3.2%, compared with 0.7% in Novemver, the data showed. Importantly, the output of capital goods, a gauge for fixed corporate investment, contracted 19.7% in December, having already shrunk 24.4% in November. Consumer goods production rose only 2.8% in December, aided by a 16.5% expansion in durables output, which was, however, helped by a favourable base. Still, the index of industrial production (IIP) grew 3.1% in the April-December period, compared with 2.6% a year earlier, thanks to a better expansion of the IIP earlier this fiscal.
