After changing the base year for the calculation of the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) as well as the Wholesale Price Index (WPI), the Central Statistics Office (CSO) is once again planning to change the gross domestic product (GDP) base year to 2017-18 from 2011-12. The government has said that change of base year to calculate GDP is done in line with the global exercise to capture economic information accurately.
The preparatory work for this huge exercise has been started and the statistics department is expected to bring this change after completion of the household consumer expenditure survey and labour force data by the end of 2018 as these are critical inputs into the base revision.
The union minister for Statistics and Programme Implementation D.V. Sadananda Gowda has said that the exercise or revision in base year is done as per the internationally accepted practice to capture the changing structure of the economy, adding that the CSO is also planning to develop a portal for collecting data with an aim to reduce the time lag in release of the monthly index from the current 42 days. Besides, he said that a factsheet on Indian economy is also in the pipeline which will facilitate decision-making at the senior levels of the government.
The CSO had last updated base year for GDP calculation to 2011-12 from January 2015, replacing the old series base year of 2004-05, while recently, it had changed the base year of IIP and WPI to 2011-12 from 2004-05.