Modi’s government flying blind on budget as statistics office digs in
New Delhi — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration will probably have to prepare India’s $300bn budget in the dark. With less than a month to go before the annual presentation, his statistics office has refused to estimate the effect of Modi’s unprecedented cash clampdown on GDP. All it said on Friday was that growth would slow to a three-year low before the effects of the ban started to show. "If the budget has to be tabled by February 1, the papers will have to go for printing by January 20. This would indicate that they won’t get any more data," said Pronab Sen, who was India’s national statistician until 2010. The statistics office correctly used available data to offer an estimate of what the economy would look like without demonetisation, and left the Finance Ministry to fill in the blanks, he said. "How much they will shave off, no one can guess." Sen estimates GDP will expand about 6% in the year end-March 2017, compared with a median 6.8% projection in a Bloomberg su...
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