It is now amply evident that there are serious issues with India's claimed growth rate, on the basis of which its leaders had pitched the country as the world's fastest growing major economy. No less than Dr Arvind Subramanian, who left the Narendra Modi government a year ago after four years as its chief economic adviser, has detailed his misgivings.

By his calculations, as published recently in a paper for Harvard University and summarised in The Indian Express newspaper, gross domestic product (GDP) growth was overstated by about 2.5 percentage points every year between 2011-12 and 2016-17. That period spans the economist Manmohan Singh's final years as prime minister and the initial years of Mr Modi's first term in office.