JAITLEY, CHIDAMBARAM SPAR OVER GDP REVISION

NEW DELHI: Finance minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday sprang to the defence of revised data showing economic growth under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government had outpaced the rate of expansion during the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime after his predecessor P Chidambaram slammed the new numbers as “a joke, bad joke and worse than a bad joke.”

Meanwhile, Chidambaram’s challenge to NITI Aayog’s vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar to debate the amended data, which was released at a press conference on Wednesday by the federal policy think tank and the Central Statistics Office, was accepted by the latter.

“Data based on facts and on the best global practices is rejected by the (Congress) Party because it takes away the last of its surviving arguments (that) “my GDP growth was higher than yours,” Jaitley wrote in a Facebook blog titled ‘When The Data Speaks.’

Jaitley noted that Chidambaram had in 2015 welcomed changes effected in the way growth in gross domestic product, or the value of economic output, is calculated. For the last two years of the Congressled UPA regime, in 2012-13, and 2013-14, growth was revised upwards, from 4.7% to an eventual 5.5% and from 5% to 6.4%, respectively.

Chidambaram said then that the new data establishes the fact that UPA had succeeded in reviving the economy before it bowed out of power in 2014.

Data released on Wednesday, almost four years after India moved to a new way of calculating GDP, showed the compound annual growth rate in GDP at market prices (2011-12 series) under the Narendra Modi government was 7.3% between 2014-15 and 2017-18, higher than the 6.7% and 6.4% in the two terms of the UPA under Manmohan Singh.