New Delhi, September 2: The central government has pushed back against criticism from opposition parties and former officials who argued that India's actual economic growth in the first quarter of the current financial year was closer to 2.6 percent, far below the 7.8 percent figure claimed by the Modi government.
The Dispute
The core of the criticism, raised most prominently by former Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, was that the government's growth claim relied on comparing GDP figures calculated under two different base years — the older 2011-12 series and the newly introduced 2022-23 series — which produces a misleadingly high growth number.
MoSPI (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation) Secretary Saurabh Garg dismissed this comparison as statistically invalid, describing it as an exercise akin to comparing apples with oranges, since the two base-year series use different data sources, weights and methodology.
The Numbers Explained
Under the old 2011-12 base-year series, India's GDP for the first quarter of FY 2025-26 stood at roughly Rs 86.05 lakh crore. Under the new 2022-23 base-year series, the same quarter's GDP works out to about Rs 80 lakh crore, once recalculated using the updated methodology.
Comparing that revised Rs 80 lakh crore figure with this year's (FY 2026-27) first-quarter GDP of Rs 88.3 lakh crore — both calculated on the same new base-year series — and then adjusting for inflation of around 2.5 percent, gives the official real growth rate of 7.8 percent.
The government said critics arrived at the lower 2.6 percent figure by making an inconsistent comparison: taking this year's GDP from the new 2022-23 series, but comparing it against last year's GDP as calculated under the old 2011-12 series, rather than the revised Rs 80 lakh crore figure from the same new series.
Government's Position
MoSPI officials maintained that once a new base-year series is introduced, historical figures are recalculated under the same methodology specifically so that year-on-year comparisons remain valid. Mixing figures from two different series, they said, does not yield a statistically meaningful growth rate. The ministry added that the broader revisions—including a move to "double deflation" in manufacturing and an expanded set of price deflators—reflect improvements in data quality rather than any attempt to inflate the growth number.
