NEW DELHI: India's GDP estimation methodology stands at par with its global standing as a major and responsible economy, a paper released by the economic advisory council to the prime minister said on Wednesday, rejecting former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian 's claims of overestimation and asserting that his paper "would not stand the scrutiny of academic or policy research standards."Five economists - EACPM chairman Bibek Debroy, Rathin Roy, Surjit Bhalla, Charan Singh and former CEA Arvind Virmani - authored the paper, producing a point-by-point rebuttal to Subramanian's conclusion that India's GDP growth rate has been overstated by about 2.5 percentage points per year post 2011, which stoked a controversy and prompted economists to doubt the size of overestimation."Having closely read the paper and taking into account all information available until 19th June 2019, the primary contributors of this note reject the author's methodology, arguments and conclusions in the said paper," economists said in paper titled "GDP estimation in India-perspectives and facts."Subramanian, who served as CEA for four years in the first Narendra Modi government, had also called for revisiting the entire methodology and implementation for GDP estimation by an independent task force, comprising national and international experts."The paper uses 70 countries as control and only one country (India) as treatment, something that is bad econometrics.Consequently, both the 2.5% GDP overestimation and its confidence interval are highly suspect. Also, the data frame used by the author (15 years: 10 years pre 2011, and 5 years post-2011) appears to be too small to draw statistical inferences about India's GDP trends," the five economists said in their paper.Stating that Subramanian's paper smacks off institutional bias against the Central Statistics Office (CSO), the five economists said the blind trust in a private agency Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy and blind distrust in a government institution that has served India (CSO) appears unwarranted for a neutral academic.PMEAC paper said Subramanian seems to have made a hurried attempt to draw conclusions about India's complex economy and its evolution."He himself admits that the results in the paper are by no means the final word', however, the sweeping conclusions and broad policy implications he lays out seem to suggest that India needs to be alarmed," the PMEAC paper said."If anything, the weakness of Dr Subramaniam's attempt to suggest that the growth numbers are over-estimated confirms that the estimation process is robust to spurious criticism. The fact of the matter is that India's GDP methodology is consistent with internationally accepted standards and is in a continuous process of improvement," it added.