Local Market Price Survey & Inflation Study

Added Jul 2026 3 design docs

Every month the government announces a single inflation number, yet the Consumer Price Index is an average across hundreds of items and cities, so it rarely matches what a family in one particular neighbourhood actually pays for atta, dal, milk and soap. Prices also differ sharply between the corner kirana store, the weekly haat and the air-conditioned supermarket down the road, and most households never see that gap measured. For an economics student, the distance between the headline number and the local shelf is a perfect live laboratory.

The intern builds a four-week price observatory for one locality. A fixed 20-item basket with exact brands and units is priced every week at three outlet types, and the roughly 240 observations are logged and cleaned in excel, converted into a base-weighted mini price index, and compared against the latest official CPI release. The findings become a 14-18 page report written in google-docs and a one-page infographic designed in canva that names the cheapest outlet, the fastest-rising items and the month's local inflation rate.

Completing the project takes the intern through the full arc of empirical economics: designing a comparable basket, disciplined field collection, index number construction, percentage-change analysis and honest interpretation of why local numbers diverge from national ones. These are exactly the skills that banks, consulting firms and market research agencies test for, and the public repository gives the intern a verifiable piece of original price research to show recruiters.

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