Inflation Bingo

How to play

Each card is a 5×5 grid of things that happen when prices rise in India. The centre square is free, as in ordinary bingo, which leaves 24 to find. Tap or press Enter on a square when you have genuinely seen or heard it — a chai stall charging more than ₹20, petrol crossing ₹100 a litre, a relative beginning a sentence with “in my day”. Complete a row, a column or a diagonal and the card tells you. Progress is saved in your browser, so a card survives a refresh, and “New Card” deals a fresh one.

There are deliberately more prompts than there are squares, so two cards are rarely identical and there is little point memorising positions.

Why a game about inflation

Inflation is usually reported as a single national percentage, which is a hard thing to feel. An index rising six per cent in a year tells you almost nothing about your own week. What people actually notice is narrower and sharper: the packet that costs the same but weighs less, the auto driver who stopped using the meter, the school fee letter that arrives every April.

Those moments are what this card collects. It is not a measurement and it is not a substitute for the index — it is a way of noticing that the abstract number has a texture, and that the texture is made of ordinary purchases. Most of the squares describe things that were unremarkable a decade ago.

Where the prices behind the prompts come from

The thresholds on the card — chai over ₹20, onions over ₹60 a kilo, a movie ticket above ₹300 — come from the same price series that powers the calculators on this site, compiled from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the Labour Bureau and the Reserve Bank of India. They are national or major-city averages, so your city will differ, sometimes a lot: a cup of chai in Mumbai and one in a small town in Uttar Pradesh are not really the same product at the same price.

If you want the underlying numbers rather than the game, the inflation calculator shows what any amount from 1960 onwards is worth today, and the price tracker lets you follow individual items over time.

Why your card fills faster in some cities than others

Every threshold on the card is a national or major-city average, and the gap between that average and a specific place is large. Rent is the clearest case: the same notional two-bedroom flat runs to several times more in Mumbai than in a smaller city, so “rent hiked at renewal” is an annual certainty for some players and a rare event for others.

Food is the opposite. Grain and pulse prices are relatively uniform across the country, because procurement, minimum support prices and the public distribution system were built specifically to flatten them. Those squares tend to tick over at roughly the same time for everyone.

Vegetables sit in between, and they are the volatile ones. Onions and tomatoes swing violently with the monsoon and with how far they have to travel, which is why a single bad season produces the headlines that make everyone feel inflation at once. A card filled during a tomato spike is not measuring the same thing as one filled in a good year.

What the card is actually showing you

Between 1970 and 2025 the Consumer Price Index rose about 53×. Individual items on this card did nothing of the sort: a cup of chai rose roughly 220×, a movie ticket about 320×, and a year of school fees somewhere near 1,750×, while rice rose about 43× — slower than the index, which means rice became cheaper in real terms.

So the squares that fill first are not the ones where prices rose most. They are the ones you buy most often. Frequency, not magnitude, is what makes inflation feel present, and it is why a daily chai crossing a round number lands harder than a school fee letter that arrives once a year and costs a thousand times more.

That mismatch is worth noticing, because it is also how household budgets go wrong. The purchases that irritate are small and visible; the ones that reset what your life costs are large, annual and easy to treat as fixed. If the card makes the second group feel as real as the first, it has done its job.

These figures are educational estimates, not financial advice.