New GDP series: India is preparing to revise its GDP series, shifting the base year to 2022-23. A National Statistical Office report by a subcommittee on methodological improvements sketches changes that are technical, but not trivial. Rebasing is meant to keep the national accounts aligned with how the economy actually functions—what people buy, how firms produce, and how prices move.
India has done this before: from 1993-94 to 1999-2000, then to 2004-05, and most recently to 2011-12. Each revision widened data sources and updated weights. The proposed 2022-23 series is pitched as a catch-up to an economy reshaped by digitisation, formalisation, expanded welfare delivery, and post-pandemic shifts in work and spending.
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GDP base year revision and the new consumption basket
The most visible change is on consumption measurement. Private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) makes up well over half of GDP. Under the new series, PFCE will be benchmarked to the 2022-23 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey, which will anchor item-wise consumption levels and feed into quarterly shares.
This matters because PFCE is not a footnote. It is where mismeasurement can distort the reading of growth, inflation passthrough, and welfare outcomes. A more current survey base should sharpen how spending is distributed across food, housing, transport, communication, health and leisure—and reduce the reliance on dated consumption weights.
New GDP series and COICOP 2018 reclassification
The report also proposes a more granular classification of consumption items, aligning India’s system with the UN’s COICOP 2018 framework. Some examples are deliberately mundane: butter and ghee move under “oil and fats”; ice cream shifts to “sugar, confectionery and desserts” rather than being bundled with “milk and milk products”.
The point is not taxonomy for its own sake. In an economy where diets, processed food use, and lifestyle consumption have changed quickly, coarse groupings blur trends. Cleaner classification improves comparability across countries and makes domestic tracking less fuzzy.
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Government housing services imputation and PFCE
A more consequential methodological change concerns housing services provided to central government employees. The proposal is to impute the value of official accommodation using a cost-of-production method: depreciation of government residential buildings plus repair and maintenance costs. This imputed value would then be included in PFCE.
In the 2011-12 series, there was no such imputation. But national accounts aim to capture economic value, not only cash transactions. If compensation is partly delivered as a service rather than an allowance, the service still exists—and excluding it understates both consumption and output on paper.
Measuring the informal economy with better survey inputs
The report proposes to estimate gross value added in the unincorporated sector using richer inputs from the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises and the Periodic Labour Force Survey. Given the size of economic activity outside the corporate sector, the quality of this measurement affects the credibility of the entire GDP picture.
The intent is to rely less on residual methods and more on updated, purpose-built surveys. That should improve estimates of output, employment and productivity in the informal economy—areas where India’s data debates are usually most heated.
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Quarterly GDP compilation: administrative data, pay revisions, and stocks
Quarterly methods are also being tightened. Government final consumption expenditure will continue to be derived from quarterly revenue expenditure of the Centre and states, excluding interest payments and subsidies. For public administration and defence, quarterly gross value added is proposed to be estimated mainly from compensation of employees, with explicit adjustments for major pay revisions—so arrears and one-off payouts do not create artificial spikes.
Changes in stocks is another area slated for overhaul. In the current framework, this component has often been approximated using simplified growth averages for agriculture, manufacturing and mining. The revised approach proposes building stock estimates from broader industry indicators, including quarterly financial results of listed companies. After the pandemic’s inventory whiplash, this is a sensible place to reduce guesswork.
Valuables beyond gold: widening the net
The proposal also widens the estimation of “valuables”. Instead of being limited largely to gold and silver, the new series would derive valuables from net imports of a broader basket of items.
Household asset preferences have diversified. Physical assets remain important stores of value. If the national accounts are trying to measure savings and investment accurately, valuables cannot be treated as a narrow proxy.
Supply-use tables and GDP discrepancies
Finally, the report signals an intent to reduce the long-standing “discrepancies” between GDP measured by the production (or income) approach and the expenditure approach. Since the two are built from different data sources and timing, they do not always reconcile. The gap is currently shown as “discrepancies” in the expenditure account.
In recent quarters, the gap has often been large enough to muddy interpretation of growth momentum. The proposed fix is to integrate supply and use tables more systematically into compilation. Supply-use balancing forces total availability of goods and services to match total use, which—once data systems mature—should reduce and potentially eliminate the residual discrepancy.
A rebasing exercise can shift headline growth rates, sectoral shares, and the relative weight of consumption versus investment—sometimes even revising the historical trajectory. That is not an error; it is the point of better weights and better coverage.
The practical test will be whether the revised series is more explainable: fewer large residuals, clearer quarterly signals, and methods that match what the economy has become, not what it was a decade ago.