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Possibly the most famous tale from the ancient Greek Aesop's Fables is The Boy Who Cried Wolf. A shepherd repeatedly lies about a wolf attack. So when a real one does occur, villagers don’t believe him.

Something similar might now be happening with doubts over the Modi government’s GDP data. While the current controversy might not have a leg to stand on, it only exists because the government has played fast and loose with data for so long that Indians simply don’t trust it anymore.

Garg order

On Tuesday, the Modi’s government’s former finance secretary, Subhash Garg, argued that year-on-year economic growth from the first quarter of 2025-’26 to the first quarter of 2026-’27 was not 7.8% – the official government number – but only 2.6%.

Worse, Garg alleged that this was not an innocent mistake – it was explicit data manipulation by the Modi government to make itself look good. He claimed that the GDP figures for Q1 2025-’26 had been deliberately revised downwards so as to make the growth rate look higher.

“The government has been using this toolkit for the last few years, of over-projecting GDP in the concerned current year by showing high GDP growth in current prices and low or no inflation. In 2024-’25 also, the Q1 GDP in current prices, which was announced at Rs 70.25 trillion in the press release of August 2024, has been reduced to Rs 66.81 trillion.”

‘Jobless people’

A stung Modi government launched a counter offensive. The news show that Garg made the allegation on was first off the blocks, with the anchor spluttering angrily to rebut his claims during the interview. (This was on a channel owned by Gautam Adani, an industrialist seen to be particularly close to the Bharatiya Janata Party.)

Later, the government fielded its key advisors and ministers not only to counter Garg but also call him names. “A few jobless people call themselves economists and appear on TV channels to harm the country,” Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said. The State Bank of India put out a research document starting with the line, “It is difficult to understand why some sections/people are unable to digest that the Indian economy grew by a robust 7.8% y-o-y.”

Much of the response by the government and its supporters focused on the allegation that Garg was comparing apples to oranges. The Indian government has put out a new data series that revised the method of calculating GDP. They argued that Garg was comparing across these two series – a conceptual mistake.

Crying wolf

While there is merit to the government’s defence, what is remarkable is the traction Garg got. The former finance secretary has been everywhere over the past two days. Even channels and newspapers seen to bend towards the government have platformed him.

India’s GDP figures were largely uncontroversial till a few years back. How then did we get here?

Unfortunately, the Modi government has only itself to blame for this. For years, it has devalued India’s hitherto rigorous statistical systems for short-term political gains.

The biggest example is the GDP numbers themselves. None other than Modi’s former Chief Economic Advisor, Arvind Subramanian, has raised doubts about the figures, pointing to the fact that they were out of sync with other economic indicators. Rather than the 7%+ numbers of the period since 2011, GDP growth might have been as low as 3.5% per year.

Subramanian isn’t alone: India’s GDP and other national accounts data were given the low grade of “C” by the International Monetary Fund.

Other instances of alleged manipulation were even more explicit. In 2018, a key government survey was suppressed after it showed a sudden spike in unemployment. Another survey was withheld when it shows a fall in rural consumption. In a fantastic 2023 research paper, Pramit Bhattacharya lays out as many as 11 instances of the Modi government stirring up controversy with statistics.

Notably, this has gone far beyond the inkhorn corridors of statisticians and entered the lives of the common citizen. In 2020, the census itself came under controversy since the Modi government aimed to gather data to collate a National Population Register alongside it. Legally, the National Population Register is the first step to creating a National Register of Citizens, a contentious exercise the Modi government has asserted will allow it to identify “illegal migrants”.

Parallel reality

Rather than placate fears, the Modi government has pushed on the accelerator. My colleague Anant Gupta recently reported on how the National Population Register has now been wholly subsumed into the census itself. This twists the very idea of a census, which is supposed to be a statistical exercise meant to help the framing of policy. But Modi’s census has individual questions on parents’ citizenship and birthplace as well as documents, such as passport, Aadhaar and voter card number. These can have no statistical use, raising fears that this data can be used to create a National Register of Citizens in the future.

Legally, census data cannot be used for legal prosecution. But so weak is the public trust in the Modi government when it comes to data security that the experts Gupta spoke to all feared the data being used to query citizenship.

Adding to this distrust of data itself, few Indians can feel this rocketing GDP growth in their personal lives. This is due to the nature of this economic progress, which bypasses income growth for most Indians and creates few jobs.

Unsurprisingly, when a reporter went around Delhi asking people about their views on the 7.8% growth figure, he was met with incredulousness and even scepticism about the statistic, given that many Indians had seen no such progress in their own incomes.

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