A 3.4-point spread, and what it hides

The gap between the hottest and coolest state on this map is bigger than it looks. Telangana's 6.36% year-on-year rate sits nearly a full 2 points above the 4.38% All-India figure; Delhi's 2.96% sits almost a point and a half below it. That's a 3.4-percentage-point spread between two states reporting on the same combined-CPI series, in the same month, under the same MoSPI methodology — which means the divergence isn't a measurement artefact, it's real variation in what a rupee buys from one state to the next.

Look at where the heat actually sits and a pattern shows up: four of the five hottest readings on this map — Telangana (6.36%), Andhra Pradesh (5.39%), Tamil Nadu (5.24%) and Karnataka (4.80%) — are southern states, all running above the national rate. Kerala, the fifth southern state tracked here, is milder at 4.34% but still above the All-India line. Meanwhile the coolest readings cluster in the north and west: Delhi (2.96%), Bihar (3.28%), Maharashtra (3.81%), Punjab (3.83%) and West Bengal (3.95%) are all below it. Combined CPI carries a heavy food-and-beverages weight nationally, so a regional split this consistent usually traces back to local food-price pressure rather than a single all-India shock — but this dataset alone can't isolate which commodities are doing the work in any one state; that needs the item-level break MoSPI publishes separately, not the state-level headline number mapped here.

The map's biggest limitation is what it doesn't show

Only 13 of India's 28 states get a reading on this map, and the other 15 aren't necessarily calm — they're simply not in MoSPI's state-level combined-CPI release for this month. A state like Odisha or Madhya Pradesh could be running hotter than Telangana and this map would show it as gray, identical to a state genuinely near zero. Treat the gray states as "unknown," never as "low," when reading this chart.

The companion CPI & WPI trend piece tracks the same MoSPI CPI series alongside DPIIT's WPI at the national level over time — useful for seeing whether June's 4.38% All-India rate is accelerating or cooling, a question this single-month state map can't answer on its own.

Reading these numbers against the RBI's own target band

The Reserve Bank of India's flexible inflation-targeting mandate sets a CPI target of 4%, with a tolerance band of 2–6% either side. Measured against that band rather than just the national average, the state picture looks different again. The All-India rate at 4.38% sits comfortably inside the band, close to the 4% target itself. But Telangana's 6.36% sits above the top of the tolerance band entirely — a reading that, if it were the national figure, would itself be a breach requiring the RBI to explain the miss to the government under the Monetary Policy Framework. Andhra Pradesh (5.39%) and Tamil Nadu (5.24%) are still inside the band but running well above the 4% target line, closer to its upper edge than its centre. At the other end, Delhi's 2.96% sits above the band's 2% floor but is the only state on this map running meaningfully below the target itself, rather than just below the national average.

That framing matters because the RBI sets one policy rate for the whole country based substantially on the national CPI print, not a state-by-state figure. A state running at or above the top of the tolerance band, as Telangana was in June 2026, experiences a monetary policy calibrated to a national average nearly two points cooler than its own local reading — while a state like Delhi, running below target, experiences the same policy calibrated to a rate well above what its own residents are seeing. The spread this map documents isn't just a curiosity about regional cost-of-living differences; it's a reminder that "the" inflation rate a single national interest-rate decision responds to is, for any individual state, frequently not the rate that state is actually living with.