Economy The Big Slowdown

GDP growth has slid, public finances are messy and there is a jobs crunch. What the government needs to do to boost the economy.

- Joe C.Mathew

IT IS NOT OFTEN that news about revision of GDP data pertaining to years gone by attracts more attention and comment than new GDP data, but that was what happened recently.

The controversy accompanying the release of the calculations of the GDP back series for the years 2005-12 by Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar and India’s chief statistician Pravin Srivastava on November 28 was so heated that the announcement of the second quarter GDP data for the fiscal by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) just two days later failed to get much attention except from professional economists.

But historical data, though interesting, is hardly as important as the current state of the economy. And the fall of the GDP growth from 8.2 per cent in the first quarter to 7.1 per cent in the current one was worthy of attention. Some fall was expected – after all, the 8.2 per cent was impossible to repeat this quarter because of the base effect – but perhaps not quite as much as the CSO estimates showed.

“GDP growth for the second quarter at 7.1 per cent seems disappointing,” Subhash Chandra Garg, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, admitted shortly after the CSO released the statistic on November 30, though he quickly went on to say that things were not that bad. Manufacturing and agriculture were holding steady, he pointed out, while others had been probably affected because of seasonal factors.