108 economists and social scientists question govt's motives in open letter

An intellectual battle is being fought through these letters, largely on social media

What: A group of economists and social scientists — 108, to be precise — wrote an open letter on March 14 asking whether the central government was trying to undermine statistical organisations. Signatories include academics such as Amiya Bagchi (Institute of Development Studies Kolkata), Pranab Bardhan (University of California at Berkeley), Jean Drèze (Allahabad University) and C Rammanohar Reddy (The India Forum), among others.

In this letter, the economists raised doubts about the revision of the base year for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations from 2004-05 to 2011-2012. This alone, they wrote, increased India’s growth rate by 1.1 per cent