Podcast | Digging Deeper - GDP Data Revision: Reading the fineprint in the year of the general election

Episode 886,   Feb 12, 2019, 03:40 PM

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Or perhaps it is the lightning fast Vande Bharat Express! Or the zooming Indian economy that is slated to become the world’s second fastest by the year 2030, as per one government claim. Or perhaps it is India’s revised GDP data that makes us all look in the pink of economic wellbeing.

In the glut of politically driven messaging that is out there in the run up to the election, it is often hard to tell fact from fiction. What one side debunks, the other claims as masterstrokes of a mastermind. What one side hails, the other is quick to dub #fail.

There is understandable urgency on both sides because the stakes are high in the year of the big, fat Indian elections where 30 million first-time voters are up for grabs, and it is after all a battle of perception that must be won by any party hoping to run the country for the next five years.