Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, in an interview to India Today on Tuesday defended the Union government’s change in the methodology for calculating the gross domestic product amid Opposition’s allegations of data manipulation.“No serious economist is looking at this data and saying that it is not credible,” Sanyal said.The data released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation on Monday showed that India’s economy grew 7.8% year-on-year in the April-June quarter, higher than the Reserve Bank of India’s 7% forecast.Sanyal said that there had been a problem with the methodology to calculate GDP until the base year was updated last year.The base year is updated at the beginning of each decade, he told the news channel. However, it could not be revised at the start of this decade as the Covid-19 pandemic did not reflect normal economic conditions, he said.“We had to wait till 2024 before we could get a typical year which we could use as base year,” he added.The government had revised the GDP base year from 2011-’12 to 2022-’23 in February. The base year is used as a reference point to measure economic growth.Sanyal added that the stronger GDP figures are also reflected in other indicators, including corporate profitability and car sales.On Tuesday, the Congress described the GDP numbers as “statistical gymnastics” being used to hide “India’s bleak economic reality”.Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said on social media that the gap between nominal and real GDP is meant to reflect inflation. “...according to the government, the difference is just 2.3%,” he had said. “But this quarter has seen runaway wholesale price index inflation of more than 9%. This is an obvious discrepancy.”He alleged that the discrepancy was “manufactured” by the government, saying that it had changed the methodology for calculating the GDP twice this year. “In June, just in time for this latest round of GDP estimates, it [the government] moved away from the wholesale price index for its calculation,” he said.The real growth number would be much lower, Ramesh added.Ex-finance secretary raises concernsFormer Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg told India Today that the real GDP data in the new series for the first quarter of the financial year 2025-’26 was not available as it had been released based on the old series at the time.“So, the number which has now been used as a base for 2025-’26 Q1 is the number that [the government] has come out with for the first time,” he said. “Therefore, comparing it with that base should be taken with a little bit of a pinch of salt.”Garg said that the GDP growth analysis is done in terms of current prices and that the government had “drastically revised” the gross domestic product at current prices for the first quarter of 2025-’26.“It’s such a massive, drastic reduction in the base year’s Q1 GDP at current prices that the growth is now 10.3%,” he told the news channel. “If you had taken the numbers – and the current prices don’t change – which were put out last year as the GDP at current prices, the growth would be less than 2.5% in current prices – nominal GDP.”Therefore, “the two factors give me a little bit of doubt about whether 7.8% is genuine or not”, he added.Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.Watch: Scroll Adda: Why India’s GDP data can’t be believedAlso read: GDP numbers present ‘greatly distorted picture’ of economy, says Congress