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Exercise in manipulation -CP Chandrasekhar
-Frontline.in

The political economy of the Modi regime was characterised by a redistribution of income in favour of a few and a worsened performance in job creation, welfare and alleviating deprivation.

AT the end of its five-year term, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s claim that the Indian economy has experienced rapid growth during its tenure sounds shallow. The gross domestic product (GDP) numbers, many observers argue, are wrong and possibly fabricated. The GDP figures have, since 2011-12, been computed using some new data sources and a changed methodology, showing the economy in much better light when compared with the series with 2004-05 as base. But the change was so drastic that the official statistical agency could not for long put out a “back series” that allowed comparison of performance across time. Scepticism about the GDP numbers relating to the NDA period was triggered by its complete lack of correspondence with almost all other indicators of economic performance, varying from indices of industrial and agricultural production to figures on investment and capital formation and the numbers on India’s exports and imports.

That scepticism turned to disbelief once it became clear that the government was willing to play with numbers to score a point. When a back series was estimated by a committee set up by the government-appointed National Statistical Commission (NSC) and released, it showed that growth was higher under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) than during the NDA’s rule. Soon those numbers were declared “unofficial” and faulty, and a new set of figures showing exactly the opposite trend was released, with NITI Aayog that has often served as a propaganda arm of the government playing a role. The doubts that this created soon led to a complete loss of credibility, as revisions of the GDP figures suggested that growth in the year after the debilitating demonetisation experiment was at a high of more than 8 per cent.

While the growth numbers are suspect, there are multiple sets of data that suggest that income and wealth inequality have increased in this short period of five years. A book from a group of economists and social science researchers, titled A Quantum Leap in the Wrong Direction?, assessing the Narendra Modi government’s record, provides two telling sets of numbers. First, agricultural labourers, who constitute close to half of those employed in agriculture, saw their wages rise by 3.8 per cent during the Modi years, when per capita GDP rose by 6.1 per cent. These workers clearly did not do as well as the rest. On the other hand, under UPA II agricultural wages rose faster, by 7.7 per cent, as compared with a 6 per cent growth in per capita GDP.

Second, while the richest 10 per cent of income tax payers saw their share in total taxable income rising from 56.2 per cent in 2014-15 to 57.9 per cent in 2017-18, the share of the bottom 50 per cent in that income group fell from 17.6 per cent to 16.0 per cent. Accompanying these trends is an increase in wealth inequality. According to a Credit Suisse report, wealth inequality as measured using the Gini coefficient, which should indicate perfect equality when at zero per cent and maximum inequality when at 100 per cent, rose from 81.3 per cent in 2013 to 85.4 per cent in 2018. Whatever growth occurred benefited the richest more than the rest, and especially the very poor.

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