The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday said it had launched the November round of the Inflation Expectations Survey of Households (IESH).

This survey aims at capturing subjective assessments on price movements and inflation of 6,000 households across 18 cities based on their individual consumption baskets.

The survey seeks “qualitative’’ responses from households on price changes that includes general prices as well as prices of specific product groups in the next three months as well as in the year ahead and “quantitative’’ responses on current, three-month ahead and one-year ahead inflation rates.

The cities that the survey covers are Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, Patna, Raipur, Ranchi and Thiruvananthapuram.

In its fourth bi-monthly monetary policy announced earlier this month, the central bank had surprised the Street by keeping the policy repo rate unchanged at 6.5 per cent. Most in the market had expected the monetary policy committee (MPC) to raise the repo rate by 25 basis points.

Retail inflation for September had come in at 3.77 per cent. Though it was higher than 3.69 per cent recorded in August, it came within the RBI’s medium term target of 4 per cent.

Based on this number, analysts expect another status-quo from the central bank when it announces the monetary policy in December.

The RBI had recently released minutes of the MPC meeting which shows that any future monetary policy action will be data dependent.

“The minutes reaffirmed our view post the October policy and the September CPI inflation print that the RBI will possibly stay on hold for the rest of 2018-19. We believe that the focus of the MPC remains purely on inflation prints, which is expected to remain benign in the second half of 2018-19 (expected in 3-4.4 per cent range,” analysts at Kotak Economic Research said in a note.

“We thus see limited scope for rate hikes in the rest of 2018-19. However, we remain watchful of the upside risks to inflation emanating from pass-through of minimum support price, elevated crude prices, volatility in global financial markets, hardening of input prices amid rupee weakness,’’ they added.