The Consumer Price Index (CPI) released by the National Statistical Office (NSO), Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), is the primary measure of retail inflation in India and is used by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for setting monetary policy under the flexible inflation-targeting framework. The current CPI framework, however, collects 'Transport and Communication' sub-group prices, including air travel fares, primarily through manual price-collection from a limited se
The problem statement envisages to build an end-to-end software system that automatically web-scrapes airfare data from major Indian airline websites (IndiGo, Air India, Air India Express, Akasa Air,...
Detailed The problem statement envisages to build an end-to-e
The problem statement envisages to build an end-to-end software system that automatically web-scrapes airfare data from major Indian airline websites (IndiGo, Air India, Air India Express, Akasa Air, SpiceJet) and leading OTAs, cleans and normalises the collected price quotes, and computes a Real-time Airfare Price Index (APIx) at daily, weekly and monthly frequencies. The system shall maintain a basket of representative city-pairs (such as DEL-BOM, DEL-BLR, BOM-BLR, DEL-CCU, BLR-HYD, MAA-DEL, etc.) selected on the basis of DGCA passenger-traffic data, and shall capture fares for multiple advance-purchase windows (T+1, T+7, T+15, T+30, T+45 days). Scraping must handle JavaScript-rendered pages, dynamic CAPTCHAs, anti-bot measures, IP rotation, and session management while remaining