INTERVIEW - Monthly India WPI data to ease volatility

By Surojit Gupta and Tony Munroe

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's move to report wholesale price index (WPI) inflation data on a monthly instead of a weekly basis will remove a source of market volatility, the country's chief statistician said in an interview on Friday.

Pronab Sen also said India was studying the introduction of a quarterly employment survey, which would fill the biggest gap in the government's economic data.

The first monthly WPI figure, for October, will be released on Nov 12, and it will be calculated on a re-based data series.

"There will be withdrawal symptoms, but on the whole I think it's healthier for the markets," Sen, chief statistician of India, told Reuters.

"At least one source of volatility will be taken away."

He said agricultural data for the July-September quarter had been late in arriving due to severe flooding in parts of the country, so it was hard to know how the fiscal second quarter GDP number would look.

Agriculture was also hurt by a summer drought in large parts of the country. Sen said agriculture output could have fallen during the quarter by between 2 and 6 percent, which may affect the overall GDP numbers by as much as a percentage point.

In the first quarter of the current fiscal year, India's economy grew an annual 6.1 percent.