Former central bank governor Dr Y V Reddy once quipped to me that while the future is always uncertain, in India even the past is uncertain, given how often the government revises economic data. Even by that standard, however, the dramatic upward revision of the GDP growth rate is a bad joke, smashing India’s credibility and making its statistics bureau a laughing stock in global financial circles.

The new and not-so-funny numbers show that the Indian economy grew at a pace of 6.9% in the last fiscal year, a claim that is fantastic in the extreme. Many Indian economists have set out to show that the new growth numbers for the economy as a whole simply don’t add up, as a sum of the parts. Every piece of data — from the tepid increase in corporate revenues to imports, credit, rail freight and auto sales — points to a much lower growth figure, probably closer to the old estimate of 5%.

Surprisingly, for a country obsessed with its GDP growth rate, there is not much outrage at this travesty, either in public or at cocktail parties. In the past, India’s habit of revising economic data was confined to relatively minor tweaks, but this latest update is a wholesale rewriting of history. In the international financial community, no one had questioned the veracity of India’s economic numbers, until now.

This makes India look bad even compared to China, which many analysts have long suspected of massaging GDP figures to show steady growth. But the same sceptical analysts admit that when China manipulates its numbers, it does so carefully and only when the actual growth rate falls below its official target, as it has of late. The authorities seem to know exactly what they are doing. India’s new GDP data clashes even with the pronouncements of some government and central bank officials, suggesting that the left arm doesn’t seem to know what the right arm is doing.

The whole episode is reinforcing the bad rap India gets for poor governance standards. To be sure, many emerging nations including Turkey and Nigeria have issued flattering upward revisions of their growth data in recent years, but generally without eliciting peals of laughter. Last year, Nigeria issued a revision showing that the economy was nearly twice as large as previously reported, but it was widely accepted because the new methodology was well explained and had the endorsement of the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF in fact recommends that, every five years, countries update the base year they use to calculate the pace of growth in the economy. The idea is to capture the impact of new growing industries, and Nigeria hadn’t updated its base year since 1990. India’s last revision came in 2010, so this one came on schedule. Only the statistics bureau clearly rushed it into print, without conducting even an elementary ‘smell test’ to ensure that the new numbers square with the reality on ground. One clear sign of the bureau’s haste to publish is the fact that it released revised data for only the last two years, making it impossible to see the long-term trend for India’s growth rate.

Nobody really believes that the Indian economy grew at anywhere close to 7% last year, and shockingly no one is willing to put an end to this nonsense. When India delivers its budget on February 28, officials are likely to claim that economic growth in the coming year will accelerate to around 8% — a figure based on the new series. A forecast based on dodgy numbers will only cast doubt on India’s claim to be the world’s fastest-growing large emerging market, though that claim could easily prove true in a couple of years, based on credible numbers.

At a time when the world economy has slowed to a pace of just 2.5%, close to the level that feels like a global recession, many analysts cite India as one of the few economies in which the growth outlook could brighten. If India’s growth rate accelerates, legitimately, from the current rate of around 5% to a rate of 6 to 7%, it will be widely hailed as a remarkable achievement, particularly when most emerging nations including China are slowing down sharply. Instead, serious analysts are left scratching their heads over the statistics department’s new data, and every story about India’s economy now includes at least a jarring footnote about its not-so-funny numbers. The government needs to resist the temptation to celebrate India’s economic success, based on this dubious data. The better part of political and economic wisdom would be to say that until more details are available, and until the new data meets more global standards, the government will continue to use the old series. Good governance is based on credibility, not a willing suspension of disbelief.