India, April 12 -- On April 5, 2024, announcing the decisions taken by the six-member Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in its first bi-monthly meeting of the current financial year (FY), Governor Shaktikanta Das observed "The elephant has now gone out for a walk and appears to be returning to the forest. We would like the elephant to return to the forest and remain there on a durable basis,"

Das was using the elephant analogy to characterise the trajectory of retail inflation as represented by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Having scaled to a high of 7.8 per cent in April 2022, CPI has declined to 5.7 per cent in December 2023 and further down to 5.1 per cent during January/February 2024. He wishes that the downward movement in the CPI w...