Summary: Prime Minister Narendra Modi loves to talk up all his “pioneering firsts”. Well, he’s now added a truly lethal one to that arsenal – India’s first post-truth Budget! Exactly 18 hours before the Budget was presented in Parliament, India dramatically upped its previous two years’ GDP numbers. Ironically, the most brazen “upgrade” was reserved for 2016-17 when demonetisation had clearly ravaged the economy. How did this happen? Well, it was simply a matter of tweaking a few numbers and changing the “denominator” against which all key figures and metrics are calculated against. Listen, as Raghav Bahl explains, on this episode of Raghav’s Take.
