Govt revises April industrial output growth

Raises to 2.3% from Wednesday's 2%, says power generation data were wrongly recorded

As had happened last year, the government made a mistake while calculating April’s industrial production numbers.

Today, it revised April’s industrial growth figure twice, after announcing yesterday that it had been no more than two per cent. It first said this had actually been 2.2 per cent and then revised to 2.3 per cent. The explanation was that electricity generation had been wrongly calculated.

This was pleasanter news than the earlier such mistake’s revision, in March last year, for the January 2012 numbers. At the time, industrial growth was revised downwards to a meagre 1.1 per cent instead of the earlier announcement of 6.8 per cent, with the apology that sugar output had been wrongly recorded."Due to wrong recording of production data, the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) for the electricity sector for April is corrected to 159.1 points from 153.8,” the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi) announced on Thursday.

Due to the mistake, electricity generation was shown as having grown by just 0.7 per cent in April; the actual figure was 4.2 per cent. However, the growth of manufacturing and mining was correctly taken as 2.8 per cent and minus three per cent, respectively.

Officials blamed an enumerator, as having wrongly recorded the  generation numbers given by the Central Electricity Authority. He recorded the provisional numbers when the final numbers were out, they added. CEA had given provisional numbers for April on May 3 and the final numbers towards the month-end.

The growth rates for basic goods in April 2013 over April 2012 were revised to 2.1 per cent from the earlier 1.3 per cent. However, capital goods and intermediate goods remained unchanged at one per cent and 2.4 per cent, respectively. Consumer durables and consumer non-durables’ growth also remained unchanged at their previous figures, of minus 8.3 per cent and 12.3 per cent, respectively.

The government’s chief statistician, Pronab Sen, played down the bungling. "Electricity and mining are not the real indicators of what is happening in the economy; they just affect sectors which are energy-sensitive. Manufacturing is much more demand-sensitive and perhaps 2.8 per cent is still a low number," he said.

Manufacturing has the major weight in the IIP, accounting for 75.5 per cent. Mining and electricity have 14.1 and 10.3 per cent, respectively.

However, an analyst noted there was a lot of difference between a 0.7 per cent electricity generation and 4.2 per cent, at a time when outages are cited as major reasons for pulling down manufacturing growth.

In March last year, Mospi had overestimated the IIP data for Jaunary 2012 by a huge 5.7 percentage points, to 6.8 per cent against the actual figure of 1.1 per cent. The correction was made a month later, in April; this time, the correction came a day later. On that occasion, sugar output was overestimated at 13.4 million tonnes, instead of the actual 5.8 mt.

The directorate of sugar provided a combined three-month data; Mospi assumed this was the data for January alone. At the time, the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, had termed the error "totally baffling".