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21 August 2024 at 10:20:16 am

Merit Mafia

The NEET scandal, which has shaken the futures of nearly 23 lakh students across India, now leads unmistakably to Maharashtra. The alleged ‘kingpin’ of the paper leak racket, according to the CBI, is a chemistry professor from Nashik who ran a private coaching centre. He was a man entrusted with access to examination material through his association with the National Testing Agency and now stands accused of converting that privilege into a criminal enterprise. The symbolism is uncomfortable....

Merit Mafia

The NEET scandal, which has shaken the futures of nearly 23 lakh students across India, now leads unmistakably to Maharashtra. The alleged ‘kingpin’ of the paper leak racket, according to the CBI, is a chemistry professor from Nashik who ran a private coaching centre. He was a man entrusted with access to examination material through his association with the National Testing Agency and now stands accused of converting that privilege into a criminal enterprise. The symbolism is uncomfortable. Over the years, India has grown grimly accustomed to national-level examination scandals emerging from the badlands of governance in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. Paper leaks, proxy candidates and exam mafias seemed to belong to a familiar geography of institutional collapse. Maharashtra, by contrast, liked to imagine itself above such decay by projecting itself as a modern, educationally enlightened state whose cities drew students from across the country. That illusion now lies shattered. According to investigators, the accused professor allegedly dictated questions and answers during private coaching sessions held in Pune days before the NEET examination. Students copied them down in notebooks. Many later matched the actual paper verbatim. Another accused allegedly charged lakhs while promising leaked papers and medical admissions. For years now, Maharashtra’s educational ecosystem has been drifting towards something predatory. Cities like Pune, once celebrated as intellectual centres, increasingly resemble giant marketplaces of academic anxiety where coaching institutes reign like parallel governments. ‘International schools’ demand fees that verge on extortion. Professional education has become a punishing financial contest in which parents mortgage savings, futures and sanity in pursuit of admissions. Maharashtra has always been a state with a rich progressive educational legacy. But today, Pune’s old sobriquet of ‘Oxford of the East’ carries an unintended irony. The city still produces engineers, doctors and software professionals in enormous numbers. But it also exemplifies the industrialisation of aspiration. Education has become transactional in the crudest sense. Once that transformation occurs, the leap from aggressive commercialisation to outright criminality should come as no surprise. In this light, the NEET leak appears less like a shocking rupture than the logical culmination of a wider moral decline. When educational institutions begin operating like extraction businesses, middlemen and racketeers inevitably emerge to monetise desperation further. Millions of students still cling to the belief that competitive examinations, however unforgiving, offer at least a narrow pathway of fairness. A scandal like NEET corrodes that belief. It seems to suggest honest students that hard work alone may not suffice when others can simply purchase advantage. But Maharashtra should worry about something else too: a drastic reputational decline. A state once synonymous with educational seriousness increasingly risks association with coaching cartels, extortionate fees and examination rackets. When the alleged kingpin of the country’s most notorious entrance-exam leak emerges not from the expected hinterlands of dysfunction but from Maharashtra, it suggests that the rot has travelled far beyond than what anybody imagined.

Why India’s GDP Revision Matters Beyond Statistics

The forthcoming GDP revision highlights the uneasy relationship between statistical methodology, political legitimacy and lived economic reality.

Over the past few weeks, the revision of the base year of GDP has ceased to be an issue confined to statistical conferences and has begun making headlines. This statistical re-set can redefine the perceptions of the country about its own economic achievement, the priorities of policymakers, and the world interpretations of the growth story of India. With the government looking to make 2022-23 its new base year, over a decade after GDP has been measured relative to the 2011-12 benchmark, economists and other officials are adopting the view that this is not a housekeeping activity.


National income accounting is based on the idea of a base year. Economists are able to remove the distorting influence of inflation by holding prices constant and assess true or real growth. The base year requires a periodical revision: with the changing economies, the old base year becomes the poor fit.  India of 2025 will have little similarities with India of 2011-12. The digitization of nearly every platform, fintech ecosystems, e-commerce, and working in the gig-economy have transformed economic activity. Carrying on with an archaic base would amount to down-rating the role played by the new sectors and over-rating the significance of traditional industries.


Contentious Precedent

The last base-year update of India, which was done in 2015, changed the reference year to 2011-12, but also greatly altered the methods, including the inclusion of more corporate data and the move to market-price-based estimate of GDP. The resultant figures depicted an optimistic upward trend in growth compared to previous estimates, which caused speculation among economists and the global bodies. Regardless of the status, the episode highlighted an eternal fact, a statistical revision is never just technical. It is bound to transform the economic discourse.


That precedence is now square -up. The change in base year to a 2022-23, a year of robust post-pandemic recovery and widespread economic normalisation will be the first such adjustment in a decade. The 2011-12 base year no longer adequately captures platform-based services, GST-led formalisation and the expansion of digital transactions. The inability of the headline GDP growth to be reflected in ground-level measures of investment, exports and employment has long been a problem with its critics arguing that the headline GDP data has become increasingly unreliable because of this disparity.


GDP is widely considered a clear-cut indicator of economic performance, but its shortcomings are well-known. GDP fails to reflect welfare, inequality and sustainability (Kuznets,1934). The informal sector that occupies a big percentage of employment is especially hard to estimate (Chandrashekar & Ghosh, 2011). This dislocation has been observed in discussions after the GDP revisions of India where growth has been estimated to be higher with pointers of economic distress in the form of reducing consumption and employment (Subramanian, 2019).


Case for Revision

A fresh base year is a good opportunity to correct these inadequacies. With a wider range of administrative data (GST-filings, electronic disclosure of corporations, records of digital transactions, etc.) statisticians can develop a more holistic picture of economic activity even in areas that were once hard to measure. It is also an opportunity in the revision to bring the national accounts of India closer to the global statistical standards, which would enhance cross-country comparability and increase investor confidence.


MoSPI and the RBI have both stressed the need to incorporate administrative datasets such as GST filings, corporate disclosures and digital transaction records into the national accounts system. Officials argue that the revised series must align India’s statistical architecture with international best practices while still reflecting India’s unique economic realities.


A more pointed question that may be brought up in connection with the revision is: is it just a greater exercise in better measurement or is it a revision of the narrative of growth?


A common interpretation is that a base-year update is a backlog statistical re-engineering, a common routine procedure of all chief economies. In the absence of such updates, GDP estimates are becoming stale and deceptive, and this action by India can be regarded as the sign of a matured statistics administration system.


But the implications are far beyond measure. A change of base year can create an alternate impression of the growth direction by redefining sectoral weights and by adding new sources of data. This change can even affect policy choices, investment, and how the people think, yet the economy has remained the same.  The Indian development story can rather be rewritten not due to the fact that the economy has been changed, but due to the fact that the prism in which it is viewed has been changed.


The combination of this two-fold nature, as a technical exercise and a narrative intervention, puts quite a strain on transparency. History on GDP revisions both in India and internationally shows that even good methodological reforms become the subject of suspicion when explained poorly.  The difficulty that MoSPI will face is to bring the new series with proper documentation, open interaction with independent researchers and clear explanation to the society on the changes and the reasons. Once the question of credibility is raised, it is hard to regain.


Transparency Imperative

The quality of data is also a burning issue. An updated base year cannot be any better than the data itself, on which it is based. India has achieved a lot with the use of administrative data, which includes GST returns, digital transactions data, corporate filings etc but there are still significant gaps, especially those around the informal sector and new forms of employment. An example is the gig economy: traditional data-collection tools are ill adapted to quantifying the scale and dynamism of the gig economy. The only way that upgrading the revised GDP series can be a credible reporting of economic activity as opposed to a more elaborate estimation of it is by closing these gaps.


The choice of 2022-23 as the reference year is also a way of making a calculated decision. The best time to use is an era of relative normalcy, one without serious shocks or structural distortions. Obviously inappropriate are the pandemic years of 2020-21 and 2021-22. In comparison, 2022-23 was a year of robust economic recovery and solidification of the post-pandemic trends and is a defendable and fairly stable point of reference of the new series.


On a larger scale, the revision is also a call to revisit the question of what the purpose of measurement of growth. It is becoming widely recognized that GDP is an essential indicator that does not encompass the quality of development. The issue of inequality, job creation, environmental sustainability, regional distribution of wealth are all important - and are often lost in the GDP growth rate. The statistical framework that embodies these dimensions in a more accurate way would provide a much more accurate and a more truthful picture of economic progress.


India is working hard to achieve its target of turning into a five trillion-dollar economy; and India requires a GDP series, not just statistically sound, but an economically significant one, in the sense of being inclusive, sustainable, broadly shared.


The more profound message is one that would be well learnt by statisticians as well as policymakers- numbers are not neutral. They are made up with decisions - on approaches, definitions, information sources, and points of reference. By revising those decisions, India can not only gauge its economy more closely but perhaps know it better. And that is what good statistical government is after all.


(Anuradha P.S. is Professor at Christ (Deemed to be University). Divyashree is Professor, Alliance University, Bengaluru. Views personal.)


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