New Delhi, Aug. 13 -- In the usual course of daily life, an inflation number does not need to be repeated for people to check if they heard it right. Tuesday's data release by the government that put India's cost-of-living just 1.55% higher in July than in the same month last year, however, is in a class apart.

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The gauge that bears this say-that-again piece of news is the Consumer Price Index, which had shown retail inflation at 2.1% in June. A nine-month long cool-off in prices has led us to the lowest inflation reading in eight years.

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Notably, it has breached the lower bound of the central...