Your brain remembers prices from whenever it first calibrated “expensive.” This page recalibrates it — scroll.
↓ A short story about your money
Hold this: a ₹100 note from the year 2000. Fresh from the ATM, back when Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai was in theatres and this felt like real money.
Every year since, inflation took a quiet bite. By 2025 this note buys what ₹23 bought then. Same paper, same number — 77 of its 100 coins are simply gone.
Another way to see it: take ₹100 of year-2000 buying power and write it in every year's rupees. ₹4.70 in 1960. ₹429 today. The label changes; the money doesn't.
The climb was not smooth. In 1974 OPEC's embargo quadrupled crude prices — and India imported most of its oil. Costlier fuel became costlier transport, fertiliser, food, everything: +28.6% in one year, the worst on record. Economists call this cost-push inflation — nobody demanded more; everything just cost more to make.
In 1991, India was down to a few weeks of foreign exchange. The rupee was devalued ~19% in two July steps — every import repriced overnight — on top of years of government deficits financed, in effect, by printing money. Inflation ran at +13.9% while the economy was pried open.
And once — exactly once — prices fell. 1976: −7.6%. A bumper harvest collided with a brutal squeeze on money and wages during the Emergency. The only year in sixty-five when your money grew by sitting still.
Since 2015, inflation has averaged about 5% a year. Not luck — in 2016 the RBI was handed a legal target (keep CPI at 4%, ±2%) and a Monetary Policy Committee whose one job is hitting it. But if your sense of “expensive” was calibrated in the louder decades, it is lying to you. That's the bias.
Pick any amount and any year — your first salary, a 1975 movie ticket, grandpa's land deal — and see what the same money looks like in every other year.
₹100 in 2000 is the same money as
₹429 in 2025
Flip it around: ₹100 in your pocket today buys only what ₹23 bought in 2000. Prices rose about 6.0% per year over this stretch — at that pace money loses half its buying power every ~12 years.
Every point on this curve is ₹100 of 2000 buying power, written in that year's rupees. The dot is your year. Hover or use arrow keys to scrub.
Every row is the identical amount of buying power — only the label on the note changes.
| Year | Equivalent | vs 2000 |
|---|---|---|
| 1960 | ₹4.7 | ÷21.5 |
| 1965 | ₹6.3 | ÷16.0 |
| 1970 | ₹8.5 | ÷11.8 |
| 1975 | ₹15 | ÷6.8 |
| 1980 | ₹18 | ÷5.6 |
| 1985 | ₹28 | ÷3.6 |
| 1990 | ₹42 | ÷2.4 |
| 1995 | ₹69 | ÷1.4 |
| 2000← your year | ₹100 | 1.0× |
| 2005 | ₹122 | 1.2× |
| 2010 | ₹184 | 1.8× |
| 2015 | ₹270 | 2.7× |
| 2020 | ₹337 | 3.4× |
| 2025 | ₹429 | 4.3× |
The oil shocks of the 1970s, the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, the double-digit stretch of 2010–13 — and 1976, the only year prices actually fell.
Six cuts of the same data that most people never see — starting with what the number itself is made of.
“Inflation” here is the Consumer Price Index: a weighted basket of things households buy, priced every month by MoSPI surveyors across 1,100+ urban markets and villages. These are the weights — and the headline fact of Indian inflation is that nearly half the basket is food (the US weight is ~13%). A bad monsoon or an onion shock moves India's headline number in a way it simply can't in richer countries; that's why the RBI also watches “core” inflation, which strips out food and fuel.
Just as important is what CPI is not. It is not your inflation rate: if your spending skews to school fees and private healthcare, your personal rate has likely run hotter than the headline for decades. It assumes a fixed basket, so it misses substitution and quality change. And upgrading your life — a bigger house, a car instead of a scooter — is lifestyle inflation, not price inflation; don't let the two blur. (One more wrinkle for the curious: until 2014 the RBI steered by wholesale prices, WPI. The switch to targeting CPI is itself part of why the recent decade looks different.)
Average annual inflation by decade. The ’80s and ’90s were a back-to-back 9% grind — prices multiplied about 5.6× in those twenty years alone. The ’20s so far are the calmest on record, and the first decade under the RBI's formal 4% inflation target (adopted 2016).
Each dot marks the year a 1960 rupee lost another half of its buying power. Six halvings so far — ₹1 of 1960 is about 1 paisa today. Notice the rhythm: a halving every ~8 years through the high-inflation 1973–1996 stretch, then a slower beat since.
Share of 1960 buying power each currency still holds (log scale — every gridline down is 10× less). A Japanese yen kept ~16%, a US dollar ~9%, an Indian rupee ~1%, a Pakistani rupee ~0.5%. Inflation is a policy outcome, not physics — and it compounds into 30× differences between neighbours.
| Year | India | United States | Japan | Pakistan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 1970 | 55% | 76% | 58% | 71% |
| 1980 | 26% | 36% | 25% | 23% |
| 1990 | 11% | 23% | 20% | 12% |
| 2000 | 4.7% | 17% | 18% | 4.8% |
| 2010 | 2.5% | 14% | 19% | 2.1% |
| 2020 | 1.4% | 11% | 18% | 1.0% |
| 2025 | 1.1% | — | 16% | 0.5% |
The nominal number is the illusion; the “start-year money” line is the truth. Rough, dividend-free, tax-free figures — the point is the order of magnitude, not the decimals.
₹100 in cash in the cupboard2000 → 2025
₹100
▼ ₹23 in start-year money
Still one hundred rupees on paper. Inflation ate 77% of it.
₹100 in gold2000 → 2025
≈ ₹2,100
▲ ≈ ₹500 in start-year money
₹4,400 per 10g then, roughly ₹95,000 now — about 5× in real terms.
₹100 in the Sensex1979 → 2025
≈ ₹78,000
▲ ≈ ₹2,900 in start-year money
Index went 100 → ~78,000; prices went ~27×. Real growth ~29×, before dividends.
Everything on this page is three formulas applied to one column of numbers — shown here live with your inputs (₹100 in 2000).
equivalent = amount × CPI(to) ÷ CPI(from)₹100 × 233.1 ÷ 54.3 = ₹429avg rate = (CPI(to) ÷ CPI(from))^(1/25) − 16.0% per yearrule of 72: years to double ≈ 72 ÷ rate72 ÷ 6.0 ≈ 12 yrsThat's the whole engine. The dataset is 66 numbers — the table at the bottom of this page — and every figure here derives from them. The rule-of-72 estimate is why the halvings above land ~8–12 years apart.
When someone says “a salary of ₹10,000 in 2000,” don't hear ₹10,000 — hear ₹42,891 in today's money. When your parents say a movie ticket was ₹5 in 1975, that's ₹145 today — cheap, but not as absurdly cheap as it sounds.
The bias runs the other way too: if your income hasn't grown 1.6× since 2015, you got a real-terms pay cut, even if the number went up. Always compare money across years only after converting — never raw.
| Year | CPI (2010=100) | Inflation | ₹100 of 2000 = |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | 2.5 | — | ₹4.7 |
| 1961 | 2.6 | +1.7% | ₹4.7 |
| 1962 | 2.7 | +3.7% | ₹4.9 |
| 1963 | 2.7 | +2.9% | ₹5.0 |
| 1964 | 3.1 | +13.3% | ₹5.7 |
| 1965 | 3.4 | +9.5% | ₹6.3 |
| 1966 | 3.8 | +10.8% | ₹6.9 |
| 1967 | 4.3 | +13.1% | ₹7.8 |
| 1968 | 4.4 | +3.2% | ₹8.1 |
| 1969 | 4.4 | -0.6% | ₹8.1 |
| 1970 | 4.6 | +5.1% | ₹8.5 |
| 1971 | 4.7 | +3.1% | ₹8.7 |
| 1972 | 5.0 | +6.4% | ₹9.3 |
| 1973 | 5.9 | +16.9% | ₹11 |
| 1974 | 7.6 | +28.6% | ₹14 |
| 1975 | 8.0 | +5.7% | ₹15 |
| 1976 | 7.4 | -7.6% | ₹14 |
| 1977 | 8.0 | +8.3% | ₹15 |
| 1978 | 8.2 | +2.5% | ₹15 |
| 1979 | 8.7 | +6.3% | ₹16 |
| 1980 | 9.7 | +11.3% | ₹18 |
| 1981 | 11.0 | +13.1% | ₹20 |
| 1982 | 11.9 | +7.9% | ₹22 |
| 1983 | 13.3 | +11.9% | ₹24 |
| 1984 | 14.4 | +8.3% | ₹27 |
| 1985 | 15.2 | +5.6% | ₹28 |
| 1986 | 16.5 | +8.7% | ₹30 |
| 1987 | 18.0 | +8.8% | ₹33 |
| 1988 | 19.7 | +9.4% | ₹36 |
| 1989 | 21.1 | +7.1% | ₹39 |
| 1990 | 22.9 | +9.0% | ₹42 |
| 1991 | 26.1 | +13.9% | ₹48 |
| 1992 | 29.2 | +11.8% | ₹54 |
| 1993 | 31.1 | +6.3% | ₹57 |
| 1994 | 34.2 | +10.2% | ₹63 |
| 1995 | 37.7 | +10.2% | ₹69 |
| 1996 | 41.1 | +9.0% | ₹76 |
| 1997 | 44.1 | +7.2% | ₹81 |
| 1998 | 49.9 | +13.2% | ₹92 |
| 1999 | 52.2 | +4.7% | ₹96 |
| 2000 | 54.3 | +4.0% | ₹100 |
| 2001 | 56.4 | +3.8% | ₹104 |
| 2002 | 58.8 | +4.3% | ₹108 |
| 2003 | 61.1 | +3.8% | ₹112 |
| 2004 | 63.4 | +3.8% | ₹117 |
| 2005 | 66.0 | +4.2% | ₹122 |
| 2006 | 69.9 | +5.8% | ₹129 |
| 2007 | 74.3 | +6.4% | ₹137 |
| 2008 | 80.5 | +8.3% | ₹148 |
| 2009 | 89.3 | +10.9% | ₹164 |
| 2010 | 100.0 | +12.0% | ₹184 |
| 2011 | 108.9 | +8.9% | ₹200 |
| 2012 | 119.2 | +9.5% | ₹219 |
| 2013 | 131.2 | +10.0% | ₹241 |
| 2014 | 139.9 | +6.7% | ₹258 |
| 2015 | 146.8 | +4.9% | ₹270 |
| 2016 | 154.1 | +4.9% | ₹284 |
| 2017 | 159.2 | +3.3% | ₹293 |
| 2018 | 165.5 | +3.9% | ₹304 |
| 2019 | 171.6 | +3.7% | ₹316 |
| 2020 | 183.0 | +6.6% | ₹337 |
| 2021 | 192.4 | +5.1% | ₹354 |
| 2022 | 205.3 | +6.7% | ₹378 |
| 2023 | 216.9 | +5.6% | ₹399 |
| 2024 | 227.6 | +5.0% | ₹419 |
| 2025 | 233.1 | +2.4% | ₹429 |