The shift to a new base year for calculating India’s national accounts is likely to be delayed as a committee of experts has recommended 2020-21 as the new base year, instead of the earlier recommendation of adopting 2017-18 as the base year.

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MoSPI or the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation informed the parliament on Thursday, “The issue of the base year revision was discussed by ACNAS again in its recent meeting held on 30 October 2019 and it was recommended to the Ministry to consider 2020-21 as the next base year of National Accounts in view of the structural reforms in the economy.”

MoSPI further told the parliament, “The exercise of base year revision of National Accounts is guided by the Advisory Committee on National Accounts Statistics (ACNAS) comprising experts from the Central and State Government, Academia, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and other domain-specific experts. While selecting a new base year, several activities, including new surveys, are to be planned and carried out to have the latest data for use in the revised base year. The ACNAS had earlier recommended revising the base year of National Accounts from 2011-12 to 2017-18 in view of the likely availability of requisite data”

India’s Chief Statistician Pravin Srivastava told CNBC-TV18 “We are examining the feasibility of conducting appropriate surveys to facilitate GDP base year revision to 2020-21 or onwards “

Elaborating on the issue, CSI explained the government may consider starting the surveys from July 2020 onwards. Neither 2018-19 nor 2019-20 can be considered for the new base year as no surveys like Consumer Expenditure or the Services sector etc have been done for these years. Also, since ‘17-‘18, particularly FY20 has turned out to be a laggard in terms of GDP growth and fiscal indicators.

If the government accepts the Advisory Committee on National Accounts Statistics recommendation for adopting 2020-21 as the new base year, the earliest year to which this can be applied may be from 2021-22, depending on the readiness of the data. Hence, the challenge for the govt is now to shrink the time gap between the adoption of a particular fiscal yr as the base yr and the year from which it is used for calculating the national accounts and other important indicators like the IIP, the CPI and the WPI.

For instance, after accepting 2011-12 as the new base year, it took 3-4 years for the new base year to come into force completely and thereby the revised series of GDP, IIP, CPI, WPI to kick in.