CSO likely to use ministry of coporate affairs' data for GDP

NEW DELHI: India's statistics office will source financial information about companies from the data base of the ministry of coporate affairs to improve accuracy of its output numbers that have come under cloud on several occasions.

From the first quarter of fiscal year 2015-16, the Central Statistical Organisation ( CSO) will revise the base year of the national account numbers to 2011-12 from 2004-05 and also start to source corporate data from ministry of corporate affairs’ database of over 3.5 lakh companies.

“We are assessing the option of switching to the MCA data in the revised GDP, as we feel it will help in getting a more accurate data for the corporate sector, especially the PPP (public private partnership) projects and those in the services sector”, said a CSO official.


The CSO uses the index of industrial production data for calculating quarterly GDP numbers, but updates these with the Annual Survey of Industries that comes out with a lag.

Currently, there is no dataset for the sevices sector like there is ASI for manufacturing. In respect of servcies data, the CSO relies on RBI that compiles financials of about 2500 firms.

The CSO blows it up to get an estimate for the entire services industry. The use of MCA data will help CSO put out better numbers, particularly for the services sector, which already accounts about 60% to the overall GDP. However, officials are not sure a larger dataset will show a bigger economy than currently estimated.

“To say, that using MCA data will increase the absolute GDP will be difficult at this point, as you never know, we may be overestimating the data right now”, said the official. “Using MCA data, our GDP numbers will be more closer to the reality. Data from multiple sources helps in accuracy of the data”, said DK Joshi,chief economist, Crisil. However he added that the government also needs to look at the quarterly demand side of data, “which is always shaky”.

The prime minister’s economic advisory council (PMEAC) had also suggested the use of corporate results as a barometer for assessing industrial performance instead of only IIP numbers in GDP data.

Production of capital goods had contracted 28% in June 2012 according to the IIP, but the first quarter results of the 17 companies in the Bombay Stock Exchange’s Capital Goods Index showed a 16% increase in net sales, suggesting that using only the IIP could be erroneous.

MCA dataset has companies filing returns, balance sheets and profit and loss statements. It will also help capture PPP projects, some of which CSO is unable to record under GDP. “We are not able to take some PPP projects into account due to the manner in which we estimate the capital formation”.

With MCA database, we will be able to take all of those into account”, the official added.