India's GDP growth overestimated by 2.5 pc, says former CEA; Govt rubbishes claim

Former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian has deduced in a new research paper that India may not have been the world's fastest growing economy between 2011-12 and 2016-17 as its GDP growth rate was overestimated, a claim the government quickly rubbished saying its estimates were based on accepted procedures and methodologies.

India's gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate between this period should be about 4.5 per cent instead of the official estimate of close to 7 per cent, Narendra Modi government's former CEA said in the research paper, published by the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

"India changed its data sources and methodology for estimating real GDP for the period since 2011-12. This paper shows that this change has led to a significant overestimation of growth," he said. "A variety of evidence suggests that the methodology changes introduced for the post-2011 GDP estimates led to an over-estimation of GDP growth."
Stating that his research paper by no means was the final word given the impossibility for researchers to reproduce the detailed methodology underlying the GDP estimates, he said, "That said, the evidence is too broad and robust, the anomalies and puzzles too numerous, the magnitudes of over-estimation too large, and the stakes for the economy and country too high for this evidence not to be debated seriously."
"If statistics are sacred enough to require insulation from political pressures, they are perhaps also too important to be left to the statisticians alone."