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Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Monday said that inflation accelerated in April to 7.23 percent, as prices of food, fuel and manufactured items picked up. "There has been some marginal increase from 6.89 percent to 7.23 percent. March it was 6.89 percent. Food inflation has increased. Primary food has reached 10.49 percent from 9,94 percent. Primary and processed food taken together total food item, which has 24.3 percent weightage that has also moved up from 8.50 percent to 9.08 percent," said Mukherjee. "However, the satisfactory declining is there in the WPI manufacture. Which has larger weightage, 64.97 percent," he added. Mukherjee further said that the weakening development in the core sector and manufacturing item was an optimistic indication. "Similarly for core group, which is non-fuel and non-food, with a weight of 60.8 percent, declined from 8.31 percent to 7.55 percent in January to 6.37 percent in February, 5.18 percent in March and it has increased marginally to 5.31 percent," said Mukherjee. "The declining trend in the core sector and manufacturing item is a positive development. But on the whole I feel that inflation will be around 6.5-7 percent," he added. The chairman of Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC), Chakravarthy Rangarajan, said the policies will have to be designed in such a way that inflation is brought down. "The need to tackle inflation and bring it down becomes critically important and therefore the policies will have to be designed in such a way that the inflation is brought down. We need a detailed analysis of the factors, which have contributed to the rise in inflation," said Rangarajan. "But I would say policies must address in an adequate fashion to control inflation. The scope for action on the part of reserve bank gets narrowed when inflation is rising," he added. Meanwhile, the chief economist of the HDFC bank, Abhishek Barua, concurred that he was astonished at the figures and that most economists had predicted a much lower figure. "This is certainly surprising, we will have to go into the details of it. I am not really aware of what exactly has spiked up, but this is certainly something that causes concern because the ballpark figure most analysts were working with was substantially lower, but if it is driven by a short term blip in a particular category within say the food basket then perhaps we need to give little more time before we arrive at any firm conclusions," said Barua. Inflation moved up to 7.23 percent in April on account of spurt in prices of vegetables, meat, milk and pulses, although onion and fruits showed a declining trend. Inflation, as measured by the Wholesale Price Index (WPI), was 6.89 percent in March. In April last year, it was 9.74 percent.

Inflation rises to 7.23 per cent in April, informs Mukherjee