The inflation hocus pocus

Would you trust your physician who, after months of prescribing and increasing the dosage of medication for your persistently high blood pressure, tells you that he may not have been entirely right in his reading of your health but that you will be all right soon?
Something similar has been happening with the Indian economy and the good doctors attending to it. Wrong inflation forecasts have hurt the UPA government’s credibility. That claim is hardly surprising, but the source from which it came recently is. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and arguably the second or third-most important economic policymaker in the country, has said words to this effect in a series of interviews, after the inflation rate stubbornly hovered around double digits despite continued tightening of credit.