The CPI-M on Thursday maintained that it was a 'misnomer' to use the wholesale price index as a yardstick to measure inflation and said the government had failed to check the rise in prices of essential commodities.
"The WPI is not a true reflection of the burden put on the people through the rise in prices of essential commodities. It is a misnomer to use it as an index for measuring inflation," party leader Sitaram Yechury told reporters.
Quoting the oft-repeated phrase 'statistics, more statistics and damned lies', he said the weightage of the basket of food items to calculate the WPI was 22 per cent as against that of steel products which was 25 per cent.
"So only about one-fifth of the fluctuation in food prices will find reflection in the WPI," he said and asserted that there had been no downward trend in prices of essential commodities.
About government's response on the debate on price rise in Parliament, both Yechury and his CPI counterparts, Gurudas Dasgupta and D Raja, said the Centre had "skirted the basic issues".
Yechury said these issues were withdrawing 25 essential items from futures trading, restoring cuts in foodgrain allocations to states, restructuring of taxes on petro products and implementation of Essential Commodities Act to check hoarding and blackmarketing.
At a separate press conference, Dasgupta said the government had 'side-tracked the real issues' and was 'politicising the question of food for the people'.
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