Data tools mustn’t get rusty: India must institutionalize regular statistical revisions
The first estimates of inflation based on the revised series of India’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) were released last week. The new CPI series uses 2024 as the base year. Accordingly, inflation in January was 2.75% (the price index’s increase, i.e., over the same month of 2025), with rural inflation at 2.73% and urban at 2.77%.
The CPI revision is the first among multiple indicators undergoing a base revision. Estimates for GDP and other variables from the national accounts will be released soon. This is an important exercise, given that the last revision for most of India’s economic indicators was to 2011-12 as their base year.
An outdated base year was a major part of the criticism levelled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that classified India in its ‘C’ category while ranking countries on the quality and reliability of their statistical systems. But the re-basing of economic indicators is not just necessary to satisfy the demands of users like multilateral institutions. Given the dynamic nature of our economy, it is important in itself.
Ideally, such revisions should be carried out every five years or less, but the series in use for most indicators is more than a decade old. The delay was primarily due to the absence of data on household consumption expenditure from the National Statistical Office. The 2017-18 consumption expenditure survey was unfortunately withdrawn by the government, which cited problems of data quality.
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