The government will publish new GDP figures on February 27

The government will release GDP data based on the revised base year 2022-23 on February 27, with markets closely monitoring growth for the October-December quarter (Q3 FY26). However, the new series, which includes significant data and methodological changes, has made forecasters wary of firm predictions.

Credit rating agency ICRA has pegged growth in the third quarter at 7.2 percent, a moderation compared to 8.2 percent in the July-September quarter. Several other economists declined to provide estimates, citing uncertainty surrounding the recalibrated data set. In December, the Reserve Bank of India’s Monetary Policy Committee had forecast real GDP growth for the third quarter at 7 percent.

Data challenge

Aditi Nayar, chief economist at ICRA, said estimating GDP under the new base year remains a challenge. “We have anchored the third quarter outlook to the existing GDP dataset for all sectors of the economy, based on which we forecast GDP growth to have declined to 7.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2025-26 from 8 per cent in the first half of the fiscal,” she said.

She attributed the subsequent slowdown to an adverse base effect, a contraction in central government capital expenditure, subdued state revenue expenditure and weak merchandise exports. However, she noted that “healthy demand during the festive season, boosted by VAT rationalization, is likely to have kept the growth rate above 7 percent in the said quarter.”

Devendra Kumar Pant, chief economist at India Ratings & Research, refrained from giving a growth estimate but said nominal GDP could see an upward revision due to changes in the weights of the items under the new series. He gave the example of mobile phones and television sets. In the 2011-2012 series, feature phones had a higher weight than smartphones.

The distortion

“For example, if I compare the period 2011-2012 with 2023-24, the feature phone can give me a negative growth rate. While your smartphone, which has a smaller weight, has grown disproportionately very high. The smartphone growth was not captured in 2011-2012, while the negative growth of the feature phone is captured,” he said. A similar distortion existed between CRT television sets and newer technologies such as plasma, LCD and LED televisions, which will now be corrected.

“All this means that the size of the economy is likely to be much larger than we had estimated,” Pant said.

Earlier in an interview with business lineSaurabh Garg, secretary in the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, had said that the revised series is based on updated and comprehensive data sets.

Published on February 22, 2026