World Bank ED Mishra defends India's 7.8% GDP growth

World Bank Executive Director Neelkanth Mishra has strongly defended India's official GDP growth figure of 7.8% for the first quarter of the current fiscal year, dismissing criticism of the data as "ill-educated and egregiously wrong." His comments, made in a post on the social media platform X on September 3, 2026, came amid a public debate over the credibility of the growth estimate, which was released by the government in late August. The controversy was sparked by former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, who questioned the methodology behind the growth figure. Garg argued that the high growth rate was artificially inflated by a downward revision to the GDP base for the same quarter of the previous year. He contended that had the original base of 86.05 trillion rupees for the April-June 2025 quarter not been revised down to approximately 80 trillion rupees, the nominal growth for the current quarter would have been only 2.6%. Mishra, who recently moved to the World Bank from his role as chief economist at Axis Bank, rejected this argument entirely.