Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Samiran Chakraborty, Chief Economist at Citi India, said the size of the economy under the new series will be closely watched because of its wider implications. “Everybody is going to look at it very closely on the size of the GDP, because it has implications for all the ratios that we calculate on fiscal deficit to GDP, debt to GDP, current account to GDP,” he said.
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government is set to shift the GDP base year from 2011-12 to 2022-23, a move that will also revise historical data for recent years. While Chakraborty expects growth rates to remain broadly similar, he said the absolute size of GDP could change depending on how newer methodologies such as updated deflators are applied.
“There’s no way of knowing this till we see that… All those numbers could meaningfully change if there’s a substantial revision in the size of the GDP,” he added.
That change in the denominator could potentially alter how much borrowing room the government has, even if underlying fiscal dynamics remain unchanged.
On near-term growth, Chakraborty said the December quarter may surprise on the upside based on recent high-frequency indicators. “We think it’s possible to get a GDP print even more than 8% given what the high frequency indicators are suggesting,” he said, citing stronger rural activity and improving investment indicators during the festive quarter.
However, Dhiraj Nim, Economist and Foreign Exchange Strategist at ANZ Research, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, flagged concerns around India’s external balances going forward, especially if services exports begin to weaken.
“I do worry about the current account trajectory from here on for two reasons: India’s exports have been sluggish… and on the services export side… there have been weakening,” Nim said.
“India is clearly facing a global capital flow problem and I do not think it is a completely India specific problem,” Nim said, noting that concentrated global growth themes and elevated geopolitical risks may continue to weigh on funding conditions.
These factors could also influence the rupee’s trajectory. Nim said the currency may retain a depreciation bias into 2026, particularly if software exports slow or import intensity rises due to strong domestic demand.
Chakraborty, however, cautioned against drawing early conclusions about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on services exports, noting that a large pool of unlisted firms continues to support India’s software export numbers.
“It’s probably too early to think that it will be a precipitous drop of this kind… especially when we are already running at more than 12% on software exports,” he said.
As the new GDP series is released, economists say the immediate focus will be not just on growth prints but also on how revisions to the size of the economy reshape India’s fiscal and external balance calculations.
