Visualizing the Macroeconomic Indicator of Consumer Price Index for India

The Government of India releases a huge amount of data under RTI. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is one such index released by the government. A CPI is designed to measure the changes over time in the general level of retail prices of selected goods and services that households purchase for the purpose of consumption. It is an important indicator of inflation but it is released in the form of datasheets and tables, which makes it difficult for the public to make sense of. Some of the visualization tools that are available are not as sophisticated as the data they represent; others are too sophisticated for the common man to make use of. There is a need for a visualization that is sophisticated yet not very complex — to clarify things rather than simplify them. The designed visualization lies in between the two extremes and encodes the CPI in five different interactive visualizations. These visualizations allow users to explore all the groups and subgroups of the Index, for any of the 27 states and 7 Union territories, with data ranging from Jan 2013 to Jan 2019.