NSO TO TRACK ONLINE PRICES TO MAP RETAIL INFLATION

MUMBAI: The National Statistical Office is set to begin a pilot project to track online retail prices for the proposed new series of Consumer Price Index, a government official said.

"The NSO is planning a pilot project with IIT Madras to see how online prices can be captured," the official told Informist.

The project aims to study technical and legal issues emanating from the process of capturing prices of online transactions, and address them before such prices can be included in the new CPI series, the official said. This is part of the exercise to include transactions on ecommerce platforms in retail price data.

The statistics office can either use database of ecommerce platforms like Amazon or Flipkart or can use web crawler to track online transactions.