ISLAMABAD, July 6: Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) for the lowest income households with monthly incomes up to Rs3,000 soared by 0.65 per cent during the week ending July 4, as compared to previous week.

This was the highest price increase among the four income groups with monthly incomes from Rs3,000 to Rs12,000 plus under the classifications of the Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) for measuring changes in SPI.

According to the FBS data released here on Saturday, SPI increased by 0.57 per cent for second tier income households with incomes between Rs3,001 and Rs5,000, for those with incomes between Rs5,001 and Rs12,000 and by 0.48 per cent.

The combined SPI went up by a further 0.49 per cent during the week under review. Thus the SPI index rose to 106.23 as against 105.71 during the preceding week.

A major event on the prices front was the further spurt in prices of petrol and electricity as noted by the FBS. Their prices during the week under report increased by 1.20 per cent and 3.60 per cent, respectively, over the previous week. Besides, diesel and LPG also became dearer by 2.09 per cent and 0.21 per cent, respectively.

The data showed a substantial increase in prices of 17 out of 51 essential items included in SPI on the basis of data collected from 17 towns as compared to previous week, as follows:

Tomatoes (8.58pc), kerosene (4.01pc), potatoes (3.78pc), electricity charges (3.60pc), eggs (3.41pc), vegetable ghee (1.43pc), onions (1.40pc), petrol (1.20pc), sugar (0.69pc), beef (0.61pc), bananas (0.55pc), cooking oil (0.39pc), wheat (0.25pc), wheat flour (0.21pc), gram pulse (0.20pc), rice basmati broken (0.18pc) and masoor pulse (0.16pc).

The FBS release also reports decrease in prices of 9 items. These included:

Chicken farm (0.95pc), Vegetable ghee loose (0.93pc), gur (0.86pc), mash pulse (0.64pc), garlic (0.50pc), lawn (0.40pc), mutton (0.28pc), red chillies powdered (0.08pc) and moong pulse (0.06pc).

Fertilizer prices, with the sole exception of Urea Kisan (whose price decreased by 0.10pc), also spurted during the week under review, in comparison with the previous week, e.g: Urea Sona (0.44pc), Ammonium Sulphate (2.19pc), Dia Ammonium Phosphate (0.58pc), S.SP. Phosphate (GR) (0.20pc), S.SP. Phosphate (PD) (0.23pc) and C. Ammonium Nitrate (0.57pc).