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Shift to healthier cooking oils grows, but India’s WPI still reflects old consumption patterns
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Wednesday, 21 January, 2026, 13 : 00 PM [IST]
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Our Bureau, Mumbai
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Despite a clear shift in Indian consumer preferences toward healthier cooking oils, the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) has yet to fully reflect these changes, indicating a lag in how official price measures track evolving dietary trends.
Over the past decade, Indians have increasingly chosen oils perceived as healthier, such as soybean, sunflower, mustard, and rapeseed oils. Consumption of soybean oil has climbed substantially, rising from around 15.5 percent to nearly 24.7 percent of the edible oil basket between 2011-12 and 2024-25, while sunflower oil’s share has almost doubled in the same period. Mustard and rapeseed oils have also registered notable gains.
In contrast, palm oil, long the dominant cooking oil in India, has seen its share decline from about 38.9 percent to 31.8 percent, yet the WPI still assigns it a heavy 38.4 percent weightage significantly higher than its current consumption share. This disparity suggests that the WPI, which tracks price trends across sectors, does not yet mirror actual market shifts.
A key reason for this mismatch is that the WPI’s edible oil weights were fixed based on consumption data from 2011-12, and the index has not been updated to account for the evolving oil consumption patterns over the last decade. As a result, traditional staples like palm oil and vanaspati continue to carry disproportionate influence in official price measures, even as consumers pivot to locally produced and perceived healthier alternatives.
Industry bodies, including the Solvent Extractors Association (SEA), have called on policymakers to revise the WPI base year and rebalance weightages to more accurately reflect current dietary preferences. The SEA has also highlighted the sharp drop in vanaspati consumption, which once held a substantial share but now represents a much smaller portion of the edible oil market.
A working group led by economist Ramesh Chand is being set up to review the WPI base year, a step seen as crucial for aligning official inflation indicators with real-world consumption trends.
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