By Sanjay Kapoor

There are several critical numbers that do not yet have an official imprimatur and hence are conveniently dismissed by the government as unreliable and fake.

What about the GDP numbers? The government has been claiming that India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. All this chest-thumping does not square with how the economy’s health is perceived by the likes of the former Chief Economic Advisor of the government of India, Kaushik Basu, who thinks otherwise. In a tweet that incurred the wrath of many noisy ruling party supporters, Basu said: “Over 2020-22, India’s annual GDP growth is .43 per cent. This places India in the middle of the global growth table”. The big question is, does fudging figures and hiding the truth help in elections and the economy? And also for how long?

Deliberately, it seems, the government has created a miasma of confusion over every data point that can allow researchers, writers or detractors to ascertain exactly what the state of the Indian economy is. There is no data that can pass off without kicking off unnecessary controversy. It never used to happen in the days of the Congress. India was a proud nation that kept its books clean and was known to be a master at smartly maintaining its key statistics.

Expectedly, there was a BBC expose on how the decision to impose a claustrophobic lockdown on 1.4 billion people – the majority of them daily wagers – was taken by the Prime Minister’s office without consulting anyone of any significance. So tragic was the outcome of the lockdown, which found many migrants in the throes of severe poverty and hunger, leaders of countries like Nepal and Pakistan had to assure their citizens that they would not repeat the Indian lockdown. Understandably, these countries suffered less from the pandemic or its dreadful state interventions.

Read more: https://theprobe.in/can-fake-news-fight-the-looming-economic-crisis/