India’s revamped inflation data addresses IMF concerns, says statistics secretary Saurabh Garg

India’s consumer inflation index, based on the new series, addresses the International Monetary Fund’s concerns about the country’s data integrity, a top official said Friday.

“We have fundamentally changed the nature of the classification that we use. We’ve increased the markets, items, and we’ve added e-commerce online markets,” said Saurabh Garg, secretary at the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Paul Allen and Menaka Doshi.

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The statistics ministry released the first set of data with a revised 2024 base on Thursday, which showed inflation remained relatively benign, bolstering the case to keep interest rates on hold. Consumer prices rose 2.75% from a year earlier, data showed, compared with a median estimate of 2.77% in a Bloomberg survey of economists. It did not give the previous month’s inflation reading under the new series.

Due to the high level of digitization over the past decade, the government has access to more real-time online and e-commerce data. “I am confident that we will continue to be among the best in terms of the methods we use to collect data,” Garg said.

In its country report, the IMF said in December that India’s data had “some methodological weaknesses” that “somewhat hamper surveillance.” Much of the criticism centered around using an old base year of 2012, which resulted in a lower rating for India’s national statistics.

The government will also release a new set of gross domestic product series in “another fortnight or so,” Garg said. The upcoming GDP data will have an updated base of 2022–23, which will present “the structure of the economy in a much better manner.”

There will be new industries, and the data sources being used will be “much wider,” with additional inputs such as from the goods and services tax and Public Financial Management System data. “I think we are ensuring that we become much more representative, and we are using the latest technologies,” Garg said.