Ex-finance secretary questions GDP calculation, NDTV anchor insists on govt data ‘sanctity’

According to the Government of India earlier this week, India’s economy grew 7.8 percent in the April–June quarter of FY27, comfortably beating the Reserve Bank of India’s more conservative 7 percent estimate.

On social media, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quick to call the numbers proof of the country’s “collective strength”, aiming a pointed remark at “doomsayers” along the way, while also urging people to avoid travelling abroad for leisure, host weddings overseas, and refrain from buying gold. 

Meanwhile, the Congress pushed back, flagging weak agricultural growth, a sluggish manufacturing sector, job creation and rising debt.

Into this contest of narratives, NDTV invited Subhash Chandra Garg, India’s former finance secretary, for an interview with anchor Gaurie Dwivedi. What followed was less a Q&A than a visibly awkward conversation about the veracity of the figures released by the government, with Garg suggesting that real quarterly GDP growth was around 2.6 percent rather than 7.8 percent. 

Last year’s first-quarter GDP at current prices, Garg claimed, had been officially put at Rs 86 lakh crore. In this year’s release, he remarked that same base figure had been revised down to Rs 80 lakh crore – a change of roughly Rs 6 lakh crore. Recalculating this year’s growth against the original, unrevised base, he argued: “If you had not revised last year’s GDP, the growth in current prices would have been only 2.6 percent.”

He returned to the same number twice more over the course of the interview, each time anchoring it to the same two figures. The former finance secretary was careful to note that both the original and revised GDP numbers came from the same government, and that the manufacturing figures and “negative growth of consumption” undercut the government’s claims of a growing economy. 

Dwivedi’s response is where the interview turned uncomfortable to watch. Rather than press Garg on his methodology or seek an on-record rebuttal from the data itself, she framed his claim as an accusation against the state’s credibility, asking rather awkwardly, “Surely you're not hinting that numbers get revised down so that they look better?” But Garg didn’t back down; he reiterated that he was “responsibly making that statement”. She pressed further, reminding him that “there is a certain sanctity” to the government's data.

By the end, Dwivedi’s line of questioning had shifted from testing the numbers to testing the guest, telling him he was “negating every data” on screen.

Finally, when the anchor asked Garg about what he would recommend to the government “to sustain the kind of growth that has been seen in the first quarter”, Garg said that it must “recognise the reality of the Indian economic situation that there is no real growth, then take the right reform measures rather than sort of trying to adjust the numbers in one way or the other”, reiterating at the end that “the first thing to be done is to recognise that there is a problem indeed.” 

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