Congress pledges to clean up the collection of economic data if elections are won

Main opposition Congress party will review how economic data are gathered and interpreted if it wins this month’s general election, a senior party official said, in the midst of doubts about official data reliability.

Economists and investors are increasingly showing little or no trust in the official economic data of India-presenting with an immediate problem whoever is elected as the next prime minister.

Former finance minister and senior party leader P Chidambaram said Congress government would tackle the deficiencies in data collection.

“We would have to set up a high-powered committee. First, to look at what went wrong with the data, and to clean up the data collecting and data interpreting process,” P Chidambaram told Reuters on the weekend.

Whether government statistics were telling the full story has been questioning for many years, but two recent controversies over revisions and delays of crucial numbers have taken those concerns to new heights.

According to a statistics ministry study released this month for the 12 months to June 2017, up to 36 percent of companies in the database used in GDP calculations could not be traced or incorrectly classified. But the ministry said there was no impact on estimates of GDP as it took a due care to adjust the aggregate level of corporate filings.