PETTAI RAP
VS CPI
INFLATION
Using the MOSPI MCP data, I tracked inflation from the pov of a cult 90s Tamil rap.
See the trendLatest month: 2025-12 · Pettai Rap basket is above CPI by 4.1 pts · GDP growth is outpacing CPI by 6.1 pts.
Pettai Rap vs CPI, side by side.
Pettai Rap is a 1994 Tamil rap that lists everyday costs of a lower income family — and complains about how there's never enough money to buy everything. CPI is the government’s official inflation gauge (MOSPI). Put them together and you see how street‑level prices of core subsistence goods from the song (29 items) stack up against headline inflation rates (299 items).
Listen to Pettai RapMapping/Weighting
I (with AI) matched every Pettai Rap item to a CPI equivalent. When no exact item-level match existed, I used the closest CPI sub-group (e.g. kathadi = kite = toys, proxied under Recreation & Amusement).
Wrong approach: Directly comparing 29 PR items to 299 CPI items without weights. CPI is expenditure-weighted (rent matters more than bananas). Equal weighting made small items look too important.
Correct approach: Re-weight the PR basket using the same CPI weights. If CPI gives rent 80% weight and bananas 10%, the PR basket follows suit. Now the two baskets are comparable.
Result: This tells us whether PR inflation is genuinely higher or lower than headline CPI.
Trendline
Pettai Rap inflation vs CPI inflation
Showing year-on-year % changes.
Key Takeaway
PR inflation is higher than CPI inflation.
The takeaway: If your budget is mostly food/child/marriage-related items (like lower-income households) and you are closer to a PR basket, you experience higher inflation than the official CPI suggests.
Analysis
Why does the PR basket inflate differently from CPI?
- PR over-indexes on food, fuel and transport — items that are typically more volatile. CPI includes slower-moving categories like electronics and services, which dampen the overall rate.
- PR has just 29 items, so a few fast-moving goods can push the whole index. CPI spreads the impact across 299 items.
Inflating more than CPI
Inflating less than CPI
January 2026 Snapshot (CPI 2024 Base)
Why is this a separate section?
Starting January 2026, MOSPI switched the CPI to a new base year (2024=100), retiring the 2012-base series that powers our main Pettai Rap Index. The two series use different item codes, weights, and classification structures — so we can't simply plug the new numbers into the existing tracker. Until we have 3+ months of 2024-base data to build a proper time-series, this snapshot shows per-item inflation rates pulled directly from the new API as a preview of where prices are headed.
What's in each basket?
Pettai Rap includes 29 items mentioned in the lyrics. Official CPI (All‑India, 2012 base) covers 299 items and weights each item by household spend (staples like food, housing, and fuel carry higher influence or weight because we spend more on them).
View Pettai Rap items
View CPI groups & subgroups
Basket changes since base (Oct 2022)
Top Gainers
Top Losers
Total % change for each Pettai Rap item since Oct 2022. This is absolute movement within the basket, not compared to CPI.
PR Item — Price Tracker
Pick an item
Select a good from the PR basket to see its price trend over the last 8 months.
Changelog
Data refresh history. CPI data is released by MOSPI around the 12th of each month.
No metric change for this run.