Kanchan Gupta, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Info and Broadcasting, questions the premise of a scholarly paper that faults Narendra Modi’s efficiency on the ‘progress and improvement’ and ‘good governance’ fronts. Professors Kevin and Robin Grier of Texas Tech College reply.
Editor’s Word: On August 25, 2006, The Wire printed a narrative, ‘India Is Much Poorer and Far Less Free Under Modi Than It Would Have Been Without Him: Study’, which reported the argument and findings of a scholarly paper posted on SSRN on August 12, 2026 – ‘Guarantees, Guarantees: Governance and Development in India underneath Modi and the BJP’ [PDF] – by Professor Kevin Grier (Division of Political Science, Texas Tech College) and Professor Robin Grier (Division of Agricultural and Utilized Economics, Texas Tech College).
Establishing a ‘Artificial India’ from a weighted common of 5 nations whose composite efficiency most intently mirrored India from 1984-2013 (referred to as the ‘donor pool’), the authors in contrast the publish 2014 outcomes of Actual India and Artificial India to check what Modi’s contribution to the Indian economic system and to Indian democracy has been.
They discovered that “for governance indicators together with equality earlier than the legislation, freedom of faith, freedom of affiliation, and a number of indicators of democratic well being, India dramatically underperformed its artificial counterfactuals”. With their examine additionally establishing that the Indian economic system underperformed as effectively, and that “by the tip of the pattern, earnings was about 10 p.c beneath its counterfactual”, Grier and Grier concluded: “Modi’s rule is, at coronary heart, a story of damaged guarantees.”
On August 26, The Wire obtained a rejoinder to its information report from Kanchan Gupta, a senior official within the data and broadcasting ministry, with the heading ‘Not moral journalism’ and a request that this be printed. Gupta’s rejoinder is printed beneath, and appended to that may be a response from Kevin Grier and Robin Grier, the authors of the paper whose findings The Wire reported.
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Kanchan Gupta, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Info and Broadcasting, Authorities of India writes:
The Wire’s fanciful report depends solely on a manufactured “Artificial India”, a weighted mix of 5 unrelated economies (38% Ethiopia, 28% China, 25% Bangladesh, 7% Pakistan, and a pair of% Philippines), to erase a decade of structural transformation underneath Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The cited working paper rests on a combinatorial fallacy. The authors cherry-picked a restricted 14-country donor pool and selectively used expenditure-side GDP from Penn World Desk 11.0 to engineer a synthetic post-2014 deficit. Rerun the an identical mannequin throughout customary IMF, World Financial institution, or Maddison datasets with a whole donor pool, and the outcome flips: Actual India constantly outperforms its Artificial twin.
The report’s governance claims rely solely on V-Dem, an opaque index of subjective judgements by nameless specialists. V-Dem absurdly rated India’s 2018 democracy no higher than the 1975 Emergency and largely ignored large pre-2014 corruption scandals, but penalised India simply as Direct Profit Transfers (DBT) systematically dismantled middlemen and plugged fiscal leakages.
An sincere counterfactual should mission from actuality. Trapped within the ‘Fragile 5’, India in 2013 suffered 10% inflation, a 4.8% present account deficit, depleted reserves ($275 billion), and a paralysed banking system underneath a hidden Twin Steadiness Sheet disaster. With out decisive management, India was headed towards runaway stagflation and a sovereign debt disaster.
Clearing this historic baggage delivered an unprecedented overhaul throughout key parameters:
- Over 58 crore Jan Dhan accounts mobilized ₹3.08 lakh crore, offering the bedrock for UPI to settle practically 50% of world real-time digital transactions.
- The IBC recovered over ₹4 lakh crore, making certain zero listed Indian banks carry internet NPAs above 1%.
- Foreign exchange reserves reached a report $716.9 billion, and inflation volatility has structurally eased.
- In the meantime, nationwide highways expanded 1.6x, 7.8 lakh km of rural roads have been constructed, and 100% village electrification wired 2.86 crore households.
- Consequently, month-to-month GST collections touched ₹2.43 lakh crore.
- Protection exports surged 10x to ₹38,424 crore
- Excessive poverty collapsed to five.3% (World Financial institution) and 10.8% (Rangarajan line), with 24.82 crore residents escaping multidimensional poverty.
A rigged statistical mix of borrowed nations can’t overwrite the truth of an economic system that has been banked, formalised, and structurally secured.
Manufacturing a phantom nation to erase printed macroeconomic information shouldn’t be moral journalism.
August 26, 2026
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Professor Kevin Grier and Professor Robin Grier, Texas Tech College, reply:
Our critic has a formidable vocabulary, “fanciful”, “cherry picked”, “absurd”, “rigged”. However it’s a case of थोथा चना बाजे घना — thothā chanā bāje ghanā (loosely, empty vessels take advantage of noise). Right here we take some time to set the report straight, realising that nothing however the actual consequence they want will ever fulfill our critic.
The donor pool within the paper is actually the one donor pool we ever used for earnings. We have now no clear concept what our critic means by “a whole donor pool” besides maybe a really giant one. However that is precisely incorrect as defined by the inventor of the tactic, Professor Alberto Abadie:
“Every of the models within the donor pool should be chosen judiciously to offer an inexpensive management for the handled unit. Together with within the donor pool models which can be regarded by the analyst to be unsuitable controls (due to giant discrepancies within the values of their noticed attributes or due to suspected giant variations within the values of the unobserved attributes relative to the handled unit) is a recipe for bias.” And “The danger of over-fitting may enhance with the scale of the donor pool… Below an element mannequin, a lot of models within the donor pool could create or exacerbate the bias of the artificial management estimator” (Each quotes from his article “Utilizing Artificial Management” within the Journal of Economic Literature, June 2021)
We selected our donors as comparatively giant nations that shared traits with India. We ran the mannequin as soon as, discovered a wonderful pre-treatment match and that was that. There was no “cherry selecting”. Artificial Management (our methodology) shouldn’t be designed to throw an enormous variety of nations into the hopper and see what falls out.
So far as datasets go, the Penn World Tables (PWT) is a extremely revered and broadly used supply. Of the 9 artificial management papers we’ve got beforehand printed, each time we use macroeconomic information for a number of nations (7 of the papers), we took it from the PWT. No different authorities spokesmen have complained, and we’ve got studied Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Bangladesh amongst others.
In sum. We all know what we’re doing. We’re not those procuring datasets and specs to search out one thing else. We truthfully did not care which means the outcomes got here out. We have now no axe to grind. Our critic is utilizing bluster rather than the scientific methodology. After we began the mission, we have been glad as a result of any outcomes could be of curiosity. Miracle? Nice! Write it up. But it surely got here out the way it got here out.
Moreover, the paper itself factors out that the earnings outcomes are solely marginally important, and we’re tremendous with saying that. The purpose is that India didn’t considerably outperform its artificial counterfactual. And that does not imply that India hasn’t grown in absolute phrases. However that’s not the identical as measuring in opposition to a counterfactual. The query is, did the economic system underneath the present authorities do higher than what the 30 years earlier than it could have predicted? Our reply is “no”. Our critic’s listing of the federal government’s accomplishments is thus spectacular however irrelevant, as nobody is claiming that India has not improved in any respect.
Lastly, the primary level of the paper is the big and pervasive decline in India’s governance measures in VDEM. VDEM is the usual supply for governance measures within the political science area. We would not be capable to publish with out utilizing it. And a number of measures all present giant important declines (besides corruption which reveals a big important enhance). Our critic right here is lengthy on bluster and brief on precise criticisms. For all these governance numbers to be incorrect in the identical route, a pretty big group of specialists by some means all determined to stay it to India’s present authorities. Unlikely at greatest. And VDEM is the other of “opaque”. VDem publicly paperwork its measurement procedures, releases coder-level information and uncertainty estimates, and makes use of a statistical measurement mannequin designed particularly to account for disagreement, reliability, and systematic variations amongst skilled coders. There is no such thing as a VDEM conspiracy to undermine the Indian authorities.
One other supply, Freedom Home, has a class referred to as, “free personal expression of private views with out worry of surveillance or retribution”. It ranked India as 4/4 (the highest) in 2012; it ranks it as solely 2/4 in 2025. Given this present alternate, we are able to perceive why.
August 28, 2026
The Wire welcomes debate on articles printed.
This text went reside on August twenty-eighth, two thousand twenty six, at fifty-eight minutes previous seven within the night.
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