Too much for the IMF.

"Ten years after India's last gross domestic product (GDP) series was released, the Union ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi) has announced the release of a revamped series next year," wrote Pramit Bhattacharya. In 2015, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) changed the base year for calculating GDP from 2004-2005 to 2011-12. To compare growth rates between the previous Congress-led UPA government and the then NDA II government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the GDP back series was calculated. Using the new base year, the National Statistical Commission (NSC) calculated that "average growth during the UPA-regime (2005-2014)was 8% , while the NDA-II government (2014-2018) was 7.3%," but the CSO calculated average growth during UPA was 6.7% while it was 7.3% under NDA-II. The Wire. Naturally, this created a lot of criticism. "There are a number of data sources on other indicators of the economy - such as credit card growth, exports, investment, consumer durable sales, production assets sales and so on - which show that growth between 2004-05 and 2011-12 could not have been lower compared to the last four years (2014-18) if both the estimates are based on the same set of data and methodology," wrote Prof Himanshu in December 2018. In 1954, the National Income Committee reported an error margin of +/- 10% in India's estimates of national income. But, "Modern-day national accountants do not provide any error estimates while publishing national accounts figures," even though they "use outdated data, heroic assumptions and rough proxies to fill these gaps in the national accounting database," wrote Bhattacharya. On 1 July 2024, "the gross GST collections for June were not officially released as a press release," but the figure was "made available to reporters informally." The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) estimated that "from the end of 2018-19 up to end of 2023-24, close to 151 million jobs were created," and "more than 31 million jobs were created even during the pandemic year 2020-21." Chinese premier Li Kiqiang "liked looking at indicators like railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and loans disbursed by banks in order to get an indication of which way the Chinese economy was really headed." India needs its own Li Kiqiang index, wrote Vivek Kaul. "In an unexpected move, the government has cut short KV Subramanian's appointment as the executive director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), ahead of his scheduled completion." "During his IMF stint, Subramanian criticised the organisation's data accuracy regarding India's growth estimates, stating on X in April last year that 'IMF staff's error margins are HUGE'." TOI. Last year, he said that "India had the potential to become a $55 trillion economy by 2047 if it managed an 8% GDP growth rate annually." TOI. We, the people, have no way to challenge the figures put out by the government but economists at the IMF are not willing to put up with myths. Fortunately, "Mospi's current leadership is keen to avoid mistakes of the past." We may finally know whether we are going up or down. Thank God.