ISLAMABAD, April 16: The prices of 20 essential daily use items recorded increase during the week ending on April 15 over the previous week. Official data released by the Federal Bureau of Statistic (FBS), a copy of which was available with Dawn, indicated that the prices rose of those products, which were commonly used by low income people particularly the salaried class.

For the households in the income group Rs3,000 to Rs12,000 the increase stood at 0.27 per cent while for those of over Rs12,000 income it was registered 0.24 per cent.

According to the FBS data, the prices of the 20 items, which went up during the period under review were: tomatoes (9.32 per cent), gram pulse washed (3.77 per cent), tea packed (3.72 per cent), mash pulse washed (2.98 per cent), lawn (2.81 per cent), bananas (2.10 per cent), potatoes (2.04 per cent), chicken farm (1.83 per cent), moong pulse washed (1.81 per cent), onions (1.81 percent), voil printed (1.62 per cent), gur (1.08 per cent), masoor pulse washed (0.93 per cent), tea prepared (0.33 per cent), salt powdered (0.24 per cent), shirting (0.24 per cent), mutton (0.20 per cent), milk powdered nido (0.09 per cent), curd (0.07 per cent) and sugar (0.03 per cent).

The week also saw decrease in average prices of seven essential items, which included: LPG cylinder (2.82 per cent), egg farm (2.50 per cent), wheat (1.37 per cent), garlic (1.34 per cent), beef (0.26 per cent), veg ghee loos (0.08 per cent) and rice basmati broken (0.05 per cent).

However, the price of 22 items remained unchanged during the week under review.