India's GDP growth has been overestimated by 2.5 percentage points between 2011-12 and 2016-17, former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian said in a note that was published in The Indian Express.
In the note, Subramanian stated that he has tracked several indicators — electricity, commercial vehicle (CV) sales, airlines, railway freight, index of industrial production (IIP), petroleum, steel, consumption, exports, two-wheeler sales, tractor sales, foreign tourist arrivals, cement, overall real credit, imports - from 2001 to 2017.
He said that the actual growth could have been about 4.7 percent during the period against the official estimates of around 7 percent.
Subramanian said it was a 'technocratic problem' which the statisticians and the economists who recalculated on the basis of a new base year have to answer.
In another study comparing India with 17 other countries, he said India’s GDP growth normally moves in tandem with several of these countries but from 2011 to 2017, we are at 7 percent and the others slowed a bit. This, he said, needed an explanation.