The Office of the Economic Adviser (OEA) under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has introduced a revised Wholesale Price Index (WPI) with 2022-23 as the new base year, replacing the existing 2011-12 series.
The initiative marks a major step towards aligning India’s statistical systems with global standards and gradually transitioning from WPI to Producer Price Indices (PPI), a methodology widely adopted by advanced economies.
Unlike the WPI, PPI offers a broader view of inflation by capturing changes in both input costs and output prices across industries.
Alongside this, the government has launched the country’s first comprehensive Output Producer Price Index (OPPI), Trial Input Producer Price Index (IPPI) and Service Producer Price Indices (Service PPI) for select sectors, which will provide deeper insights into pricing trends across manufacturing industries.
The newly introduced Output PPI tracks price movements of goods produced by industries, while the Trial Input PPI measures fluctuations in the cost of raw materials and other inputs purchased by manufacturers.
According to provisional estimates, rising costs across India’s textile and apparel value chain have been seen. Within manufactured products, textiles registered 10.22% year-on-year inflation, while wearing apparel recorded 4.28% inflation in May 2026. Leather and related products also saw inflation of 4.33%.
For textile mills, garment manufacturers and fashion brands, these trends indicate increasing production costs that could influence raw material sourcing, manufacturing expenses, pricing strategies, export competitiveness and retail margins.
The new framework is expected to offer a more comprehensive understanding of input costs, production expenses and output pricing across the value chain for the apparel and textile industry.
The government stated WPI will continue to be published for the next five years, considering its extensive use in price escalation clauses, procurement contracts and industrial agreements. This transition period will provide textile and apparel businesses, sourcing companies and other stakeholders sufficient time to shift towards the new PPI framework.
The methodology for assigning weights has also been updated. Unlike the previous series, which used Net Traded Value, the new WPI is based on Gross Value of Output (GVO), offering a more accurate representation of domestic production activities.
Bharat Tex Special Report 2026 
