Naturally, financial intermediaries in Mumbai don’t want Modi to tell creditors and debtors the truth about growth, especially since they can’t undo their previous bets on 7% expansion without career-limiting, wealth-destroying – and possibly even freedom-endangering – consequences. But if Modi doesn’t order a thorough revamp of the discredited data in his second five-year term, the danger is that every quarterly growth announcement from now on will be discounted by 2.5 percentage points – the Subramanian factor. That means asking investors to accept that the March quarter’s published 5.8% GDP expansion – a fourth straight quarter of cooling – may have been as low as 3.3%.