ISLAMABAD, June 22: Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) soared by 0.42 per cent for the lowest income households during the week ending June 21, over the previous week, according to the price data released by the Federal Bureau of Statistics here on Saturday.

The overall increase in SPI was recorded as 0.30 per cent. As a result, the index rose to 105.41, denoting an increase in SPI of 5.51 per cent during the current financial year.

The highest increase in SPI was revealed in respect of the lower middle income strata with monthly incomes between Rs3,001 and Rs5,000 with increase of 0.43 per cent. It went up for income group Rs5,001-12,000 by 0.35 per cent and for those above Rs12,000 by only 0.04 per cent. This means that the lowest and middle income groups were the hardest hit by the price spiral.

For the purposes of measuring SPI, the FBS collected prices of 51 essential items from 17 towns. On average, the prices of as many 18 items went up during the week under report, as compared to previous week. These included: Vegetable ghee (3.30%); garlic (3.02%); chicken farm (2.97%); potatoes (2.82%); wheat flour (1.58%); mustard oil (1.29%); wheat (1.01%); sugar (0.88%); rice basmati (broken) (0.85%); eggs (0.82%); vegetable ghee (tin) (0.30%); curd (0.27%); mash pulse (0.25%), cooked dal plate (0.23%), cooking oil (0.16%), gur (0.14%), masoor pulse and voile (0.03% each).

There was decrease in prices of 9 items during the week under review as against previous week as follows: Tomatoes (9.03%); onions (5.02%); kerosene oil (3.07%); petrol (1.23%); bananas (1.00%); red chillies powdered (0.99%); moong pulse (0.89%); mutton (0.32%); and gram pulse (0.26%).