India to update national accounts base year to 2022–23; new data effective from February 26–27, says Nirmala Sitharaman

India will soon revise the base year used for calculating national accounts, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in Parliament on Wednesday. The new base year—2022–23—will come into effect from February 26–27 next year, marking a major update to the country’s economic data framework.

The revision will replace the current base year of 2011–12, which has been in use for more than a decade. The Finance Minister said the update is intended to ensure that national account statistics better reflect the present structure of the economy.

Sitharaman made the announcement while addressing concerns over the recent C grade assigned to India’s national accounts data by an International Monetary Fund report. She explained that the rating was linked to the outdated base year, not to the quality or credibility of the data itself.


"The point was the quality of data on which the C grade was given. The grade was assigned to data on national accounts, what was the reason behind C rating? THat the data is based on an outdated base year which is 2011-2012 but Govt of India is now changing that and from next year we will have a data base year as 2022-2023 and from Feb 26-27th it will come into execution," the union minister said during the Winter Session.

The debate over data quality intensified earlier this week after the National Statistics Office released GDP figures for the July–September quarter. While India’s real GDP rose 8.2% during the period, beating estimates, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh described the timing of the release as “ironic,” pointing to the IMF’s grading.

Ramesh argued that despite the headline growth figure, deeper indicators told a less encouraging story. He noted the lack of improvement in Gross Fixed Capital Formation, asserting that “high GDP numbers cannot be sustained without a revival in private investment,” which he said remains absent.

He also questioned the GDP deflator, arguing that the official figure implied an inflation rate of just 0.5%, a level he said was inconsistent with the daily experience of households coping with rising prices. According to him, the government was “understating inflation to make GDP growth look better.”