In a first, FM Arun Jaitley authors a section of Economic Survey

NEW DELHI: Breaking from the tradition, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has made a contribution to the Economic Survey by authoring a section of the report card.

"The Survey has greatly benefitted from the comments and insights of the Hon'ble Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who also authors a section in the Survey, possibly the first such contribution by a Finance Minister," Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) Arvind Subramanian wrote in the acknowledgement section of the Survey.

Subramanian also sincerely acknowledged the comments and inputs from other ministers, including M Venkaiah Naidu, Suresh Prabhu, Ramvilas Paswan, Ananth Kumar, Jagat Prakash Nadda, Radha Mohan Singh, Smriti Zubin Irani, Dharmendra Pradhan, Piyush Goyal, Nirmala Sitharaman, Jayant Sinha and Ministers of State for Finance - Santosh Kumar Gangwar and Arjun Ram Meghwal.

In a lighter vein, the Chief Economic Adviser said, "and this year, we have no fear in the Survey being judged by its cover, which breaks ground with its creative design."

For the first time, Subramanian said, "the Economic Survey has embraced Big Data, and we mine this data to shed new light on the flow of goods and people within India."

"With some immodesty, we claim that this Survey produces the first estimate of the flow of goods across states within India, based on analyzing transactions level data provided by the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN)," he added.

The CEA also claimed that this year's survey furnishes exciting new evidence on the flows of migrants within India, based on detailed origin-destination passenger data provided by the Ministry of Railways and on a new methodology for analyzing the census data.

Noting that this year's survey is different in coming in just one volume, Subramanian said the detailed review of the year gone by that was covered by the companion volume will now appear later in the year as a standalone document.