Let's bring an end to the great Indian GDP controversy

The statistics ministry should address the limitations of databases used for GDP estimates

- PRAMIT BHATTACHARYA

The proposed revamp of India's national accounts series has raised hopes that it will bring an end to the long-running controversy around India's gross domestic product (GDP) numbers.

The initial signs are promising. Over the past year, the Union ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi) has released pending surveys, and also engaged data users through a series of public seminars.

At a recent seminar held at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) in Mumbai, Mospi's national accounts division provided a broad overview of the changes we could expect to see in the new national accounts series.

The most important change in the new series may be the manner in which informal sector growth is estimated.

The use of formal sector proxies to estimate informal sector growth has been a longstanding complaint about the national accounts series.

In the new series, data from the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) may be used to estimate the informal sector's output.

Mospi's attempts to inform data users about the forthcoming changes are indeed commendable.

However, it needs to do more.

There are three key steps it can take to bolster the credibility of the new national accounts series.

The first step would be to release all the underlying data, metadata and documentation in an accessible format.

Survey datasets used in national accounts are already publicly available.