NK Singh, on May 9, said that the Finance commission would reconcile data from several sources as a matter of prudence before submitting its report, as per a Mint report.
The Chairman of the 15th Finance Commission, along with the rest of its members, were in Mumbai to meet the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor and its other members, and key people from the banking and finance sector.
Singh said that members of the Commission will stay back in Mumbai to reconcile the data provided by the Finance Ministry,the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG).
This include key financial variables of states’ expenditure and debt from CAG, and the data on central government’s debt and public sector borrowings.
The statement comes after doubts were raised by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) over the veracity of the MCA-21 database used in GDP calculations in March. An NSSO study found that around 36 percent of the companies included in the MCA-21 database were either untraceable or wrongly classified.
The gaps were so severe that the NSSO had to scrap two detailed reports based on the survey.
The database is a key factor introduced in India's GDP calculations and statisticians say that the decline in the use of a tested database in India’s national accounts have affected the credibility of official statistics from sources like the Central Statistics Office.
(With inputs from PTI)
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