BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy had predicted, in 2015, that the economy was headed for a tailspin. He had said that a ‘major crash was inevitable’ in Indian economy. His words have proven right with GDP 4.5% at the moment.
However, Swamy that the actual figure is 1.5%. He had told Huffington Post two days before the GDP figures were revealed: “Do you know what the real growth rate today is? They are saying that it is coming down to 4.8%. I’m saying it is 1.5%.”
Earlier in July, Narendra Modi government’s former Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian had said that India's economic growth rate has been overestimated by around 2.5 percentage points between 2011-12 and 2016-17 due to a change in the method of calculating GDP.
“Official estimates place annual average GDP growth between 2011-12 and 2016-17 at about 7 per cent. We estimate that actual growth may have been about 4.5 per cent with a 95 per cent confidence interval of 3.5 - 5.5 per cent,” he had said.
Recently, economic growth sank further to hit an over 6-year low of 4.5 per cent in July-September, as per official data released on Friday. This is the lowest since the January-March quarter of 2013.
