New Delhi, The Finance Ministry on Friday dismissed any aspersions over the government estimated GDP figures after another government agency NSSO raised questions over the ” dubious” database used to arrive at the growth numbers in certain quarters.
In a report published on its website, the government’s National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) had said 39 per cent of the companies included in a key database used to estimate India’s economy activity and GDP growth were closed, untraceable or mis-classified.
The corporate database belonged to another government department– Ministry of Corporate Affairs — online database of corporates –MCA21. The findings were unusual criticism by one government agency of another at a time when international confidence in the accuracy and reliability of India’s publicly reported GDP data have been raised.
NSSO released the Technical Report of Services Sector Enterprises in India in which it had utilized a sample of 35,456 enterprises taken from the database of Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) for the out-of-survey units.
The Finance Ministry said the (NSSO) Report has stated that 38.7 per cent of the sample of 35,456 enterprises comprised out-of-survey units and added that “some sections of the media have misinterpreted these out-of-survey enterprises (as classified for the purposes of surveying the services sector) to be enterprises that do not exist in the economy.
On the basis of this interpretation, the suggestion has emerged that by not removing out-of-survey enterprises from the MCA database, Central Statistics Office (CSO) over-estimates the Gross Domestic Product of the country.
