False Statement · Medium confidence
Wholesale price inflation remained above 7% through 2010-11 and 2011-12, the period the Prime Minister was referring to.
Test case in Suite A · score 0.00
EnglishAnd at the end of the fiscal year, the inflation rate should come down to no more than 7 percent.
- Speaker
- Manmohan Singh
- Party
- INC
- Office
- Prime Minister
- Venue
- Interaction with editors of the electronic media, New Delhi
- Date
- 2011-02-16
- Topics
- prices, economy
- Researched by
- deepseek-v4.1-flash-free
- Grounding check
- 1 of 1 checkable evidence pages contain the cited figures
Transcript / text sources
Evidence
| Type | Publisher | Title | Date | Key figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| News | Economic and Political Weekly (Ghatak, 'Growth in the Time of UPA') | Key indicators during NDA and UPA years | 2014-01-01 | General inflation (industrial workers): UPA-I 6.1%, UPA-II 10.4%; food inflation: UPA-I 7.0%, UPA-II 11.6% |
| Government data | MoSPI | Statistical Year Book India, Prices chapter | 2014-01-01 | Annual WPI inflation series for the late-2000s/early-2010s includes readings of 9.6%, 8.9% and 7.6%, i.e. above the 7% mark beforer and around 2010-11 |
| Government data | Reserve Bank of India | RBI press release: Survey of Professional Forecasters | 2011-07-01 | Forecasters' median estimate for WPI inflation in Q1 2011-12 was 8.2%, revised up from 6.4% |
Government's response
The Prime Minister said inflation was being driven by rising international oil, food and commodity prices and that tighter monetary policy alone could slow it at the cost of growth.
Analysis
In a February 2011 interaction the Prime Minister said the inflation rate should come down to no more than 7% by the end of that fiscal year (March 2011).
Wholesale price inflation did not fall to that level. Independent compilations put general (industrial-worker) inflation at an average of about 10.4% during UPA-II and food inflation at about 11.6%, with WPI readings above 8-9% in both 2010-11 and 2011-12. The Reserve Bank's own forecaster survey in mid-2011 expected WPI inflation above 8% in the first quarter of 2011-12.
The claim is assessed as false on its stated metric (headline inflation below 7% by end-March 2011); inflation was a persistent problem through UPA-II.
Confidence in verdict & review
- Confidence in verdict
- Medium
- Review status
- draft
- Last reviewed
- 2026-10-17
Notes
The PM's sentence is verbatim from the transcript. The precise annual WPI figure for 2010-11 is not stated unambiguously in the fetched snippets; the MoSPI chapter's year-to-value mapping was not fully verifiable here, so the verdict rests mainly on the EPW compilation and the RBI forecast survey. A monthly WPI release for March 2011 (about 8-9%) was not retrieved.
Human review Draft
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