I’ve created the above satire to ram home the seriousness of the issue, not trivialise it. As new technology, global commercial rules, social mobility and income growth alter national economies, the relative importance of different variables changes.

For example, in an agrarian society with a per capita annual income under $100, people would eat coarse cereal and grain. But as countries and citizens become richer, say at annual income levels above $1,500 per capita, they begin to consumer much more fruit, milk and animal protein (meat). Necessarily then, you have to give a higher weight to these items to calculate food inflation.

Similarly, in 2005, a new telecom subscriber had to buy a handset (Rs 10,000), and pay a relatively higher amount for voice and data (say, Rs 2,000 per month).

So an individual subscriber represented a far more significant measure of economic output than minutes of data consumption (which was negligible when there were no iPhones, YouTube videos or Facebook).

But today, in 2018, in the multimedia and Reliance Jio digital era, handsets and voice calls have become free, while people are paying to consume gigabytes of data. Therefore, the unit of economic measurement should now switch to minutes or hours of data consumed.