New Delhi, Mar 19 (KNN) Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar has released a digitised compendium on Consumer Price Index (retail inflation) for Industrial Workers, which will serve as a reference for researchers, policy makers, students.

"Digitization of historical data on CPI-IW (consumer price index for industrial workers) for more than 7 decades in the shape of compendium will bridge the data gap on the subject and will be an inspiration to other agencies compiling price indices or other statistics to follow the suit," the labour ministry quoted Gangwar as saying in a statement on Thursday.

The Compendium is a first of its kind publication and is being released at a time when the Labour Bureau, a pioneer public institute in this country on index compilation and labour statistics, is celebrating the centenary year of its formation, he added.

The Labour Bureau began compiling the index in 1945. Collating index at one place right from its inception till date in the form of a compendium was keenly felt keeping in view the interests of a variety of institutional and individual stakeholders.

There have been a number of CPI series available in the country from time to time for specific purposes and almost every series has undergone a periodic revision.

In old times, the series published had limited reach to related agencies and were also available only at aggregated level.

With a view to fulfilling the demand of the users, the Labour Bureau started publishing the Annual Report on CPI-IW from 1995, providing subgroup index for every centre.

''Taking this further, bringing all information on CPI-IW on base 1944, 1949, 1960, 1982 and 2001 together at one place in the form of compendium will be of great importance for the researchers and policy makers,'' the statement added.

Labour Secretary Apurva Chandra said the compendium envelops index numbers at broad group levels for individual centres and at all-India level.

The information ranges from interim series of 1944 and 1949 to 1960 to 1982 and to the latest gone by series of base 2001 for the period January 1945 to August 2020. The huge amount of data in terms of time and space dictated us to split this compendium in four volumes.

The first volume has chapters related to interim series and index data on base 1944 and 1949 for the period January 1945 to March 1954 and for April 1954 to July 1968, respectively.

The second volume provides index data on 1960 series for the period August 1968 to September 1988.

The third and fourth volume give similar information on base 1982 for the period October 1988 to December 2005 and on base 2001=100 for January 2006 to August 2020.

''The quantum of information on CPI-IW at one place in the form of this compendium will serve as a reference for researchers, policy makers, students, etc. interested in understanding price indices and inflation trends,'' the statement said.