Has India now formally decoupled from the OECD countries? Certainly you’d think so, going by the traditional indicators dished out from time to time — the IIP, the Purchasing Manager’s Index, and so on. But how correct is the data? Farm output is going to be low, the corporate sector is hardly seeing any growth in its topline and exports continue to do badly. So where is this growth in IIP coming from? In the past, we have seen growth coming from innocuous categories and it could well be that this is once again the case.
Satish Jain, New Delhi