Amid the ongoing debate over the credibility of India's latest GDP estimates, the IMF has welcomed the country's efforts to modernise its statistical framework,
saying the incorporation of a new Index of Industrial Production (IIP) and Producer Price Index (PPI) series should help improve the accuracy of GDP estimates. "The latest GDP release that we just talked about incorporated both a new index of industrial production, and a new producer price index series, and those two new series should help improve India's GDP estimates," Julie Kozack, Director of the Communications Department, IMF, said in response to a question from PTI. However, the IMF has also urged for further strengthening of data quality & the statistical framework, "we, of course, encourage the authorities to continue to further strengthen the statistical framework and data quality along the lines that they're progressing," Kozack said. Julie Kozack, Director of the Communications Department, IMF told PTI, "this upward surprise (in India's Q1 GDP data) was driven by stronger-than-expected activity in the services sector, and also in exports. I think what we would say is the outcome also underscores the resilience of the Indian economy, despite the energy price shock. And it also means that, as we've been saying for quite some time, that India does remain a key growth engine for the world," she stated. In an exclusive conversation with Times Now Digital, Mitali Nikore, Founder and Chief Economist of Nikore Associates, had said, "over time, I do believe that the government is working to improve the calculation of the GDP. Even with the IMF report, there were certain recommendations from the IMF that were made to the Ministry of Statistics and updating the base year was one of them. Introducing the double deflation method was one of them. So the government is at least making an attempt to improve the robustness of the calculations, making it internationally comparable..I think over the rest of the year, as the estimates are corrected, as more accurate data comes in, we will come to know about that as well. But at this point, what is, what is concerning me is that people are not believing, people are saying, I'm experiencing that my life, my standard of living, my wages, my cost of living, these are not in consonance with a country that is growing at 7.8 or 8%. So why am I not feeling the benefits of these growths coming to me? And I think that is where a lot of the policy work really needs to be done. Because when we are looking at, know, how, of course, even if this growth number is correct, you know, and mostly it is correct in terms of the calculation, it's correct. Whatever happens, whatever growth we are achieving, we have to create a society, we have to create an economy where more people are participating in the benefits of that growth. When the unorganised sector, which is today feeling the pain, has pathways to become more formalised, more organised. We have free trade agreements and we have signed with many countries. So we want MSMEs to be able to take the benefits of those free trade agreements and the global value chains. We talk about unemployment and we know that there's crisis of a large youth population which is looking for work. We have to see that from a gender lens and say that there are so many women in that group. In fact, a large majority of job seekers in urban areas today are post-graduate women. So why is it that they are not able to access even if jobs are on offer? So I think there is a whole lot of action required on the policy side for truly this growth to translate into development."
