New Delhi: The Modi government kept revising the figures against which India’s GDP is calculated until it got to the current “chest-thumping” growth rate, the Congress party said on Thursday (September 3).If the government had not made these revisions – four times in the last year’s GDP figure – and if it had accounted for inflation properly, then “real GDP growth is basically zero – nowhere near 7.8%”, said Congress MP and the party’s general secretary in charge of communications Jairam Ramesh in a detailed statement on X.The party was responding to the latest GDP growth estimate for the April-June period released by the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s (MoSPI). The estimate says the GDP growth rate in the first quarter of 2026-27 was 7.8%.But Ramesh pointed out that the denominator against which total economic activity is divided to arrive at the GDP was revised four times. With each revision, that number – the 2025-26 first-quarter GDP figure – kept falling.Last year’s number ultimately fell by just over Rs 6 lakh crore – more than thrice the annual Union Budget allocation for education.Since the overall size of the economy last year kept falling, India became a Rs 80 lakh crore economy rather than a Rs 86 lakh crore economy. Yet the percentage growth rate of the economy over this quarter started looking much rosier, the statement explains.Former finance secretary questioned logic of revisionsRamesh, who was minister for commerce and industry in the UPA years, referred to former Union finance secretary Subhash Garg’s recent statements questioning the 7.8% growth rate on the same premise – if the number we are comparing current growth against keeps shrinking, the new numbers look better.The Congress party has asked the Modi government questions related to the GDP figures and downward revisions in previous years’ GDP estimates.In fact, Garg has pointed out that the nominal GDP numbers don’t even make for apt comparisons; what really matter is the inflation-adjusted figure or real GDP. And if that is taken into account, India’s growth rate shrinks to unprecedented lows.Garg clarified in another interview that he doesn’t think India’s GDP grew zero per cent – it’s likely to be “closer to 4% or 5%“.Not just one quarter’s reductionRamesh points out in the statement that the GDP estimates have been revised downwards for four financial years (from 2022 to 2026), with the cuts being made post-facto in “almost every quarter” from 2022-23 onwards. This was done to GDP that had not been adjusted for inflation.“It [GDP] has gone down by between Rs 8–12 lakh crore each year,” Ramesh writes. “This means we have been over-reporting our GDP for four years.”Taken together, the over-reporting (the amounts the government has shaved off previous’ quarters’ economic activity), adds up to Rs 43 lakh crore – that figure is similar to the GSDP of Maharashtra, India’s largest economy.“The government must provide an explanation for this. How has a change of methodology [revising the base year] produced such a drop in the estimated size of the Indian economy?” Ramesh writes in the statement.Inflation inadequate?Ramesh also says that readjusting the nominal GDP for inflation by 2.5% is inadequate when “retail inflation for the same period was 3.9%, wholesale inflation was 9.4%”, and the cost of several essentials has skyrocketed.He says the gap between the deflator (2.5%) and the actual inflation was “apparently the largest such gap on the record” and usually sat nearer 1–1.5%.This would imply that the economic growth rate would shrink even compared with the former finance secretary’s conservative estimate of 4% to 5% for the first quarter of the current financial year.“There is more than enough reason to ask whether this growth figure [7.8%] reflects reality or whether it is simply a case of arithmetic being made to work in the government’s favour,” the statement says.Impact on which economic activity?While MoSPI has explained the revisions in previous years’ GDP figures as a result of the base year change in 2022, what it does not say so far is how those reductions in economic activity spread across sectors. Where is the Rs 6 lakh crore that was over-estimated and later corrected?Garg has also raised a similar question – the government has not yet explained where the Rs 6 lakh crore that was being over-estimated. Was it corrected in the figures for agriculture, services, manufacturing, or electricity or another part of the economy?The Congress party’s full statement is below: