NEW DELHI: Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan on Tuesday stoked a fresh controversy, raising doubts about the country’s economy clocking 7% growth at a time when not enough jobs are being created, and called for an impartial body to look into the numbers to restore confidence.

“I know one minister (in the Modi government) has said (that) how can we be growing at 7% and not have jobs. Well, one possibility is that we are not growing at 7%,” he was quoted as saying in an interview to a business news channel. Recently, finance minister Arun Jaitley had said that an economy cannot grow at over 7% and not create jobs.

As RBI governor, Rajan had praised the Central Statistics Office on the GDP data changes. “CSO is to be commended on the changes it has made to the methodology of estimating GDP, bringing India up to international best practice,” he had said in his monetary policy statement on March 4, 2015.

“Yet the picture it presents of a robust economy, with growth having picked up significantly over the last three years, is at odds with still-low direct measures of growth of production, credit, imports and capacity utilisation as well as with anecdotal evidence on the state of the economic cycle. Nevertheless, the picture of a steadily recovering economy appears right,” he had said.

He had also consistently praised the country’s robust economic growth, and in an interview with BBC in January 2016, he had said the economy was “growing reasonably” despite two droughts.

Rajan, who has served as chief economic adviser and RBI governor, also said a clean-up act was needed to clear any confusion over the numbers.

“I just think that we need now to essentially clean up, find out what in fact is the source of confusion with the new GDP numbers, with the revisions etc. I would say setting up an impartial body to look at it is an important step to resorting confidence,” he said

Late last year, a major controversy had erupted over the back series GDP data which showed that growth rates during the UPA era had slowed while economic expansion under the NDA was better than that of the UPA regime.

Last month, another row erupted over jobs after a news report said the unemployment rate in the country had soared to a 45-year high of 6.1% in 2017-18. The political slugfest came against the backdrop of the resignation of two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), who said they were bypassed by the government and amid allegations that the government was not releasing a jobs report which was finalised by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) in December as it had shown a sharp decline in employment post demonetisation.

Rajan, who is a professor in Chicago University’s Booth School of Business, is in India to promote his new book ‘The Third Pillar’. He said strong broadbased growth was needed for creating good jobs.

“We need stronger broad-based growth, which primarily for most people means good jobs. What we need to do is focus on how do we create good jobs for the vast number of people who are leaving schools, who are leaving agriculture, who are leaving universities, in such a way that they can expand India's growth,” Rajan said.

“Lot of people have said the population dividend should not become a population curse. This is the time when we need to make sure that in fact doesn't happen,” he was quoted as telling another news channel.

Rajan, who was known for speaking his mind during his term as RBI governor, backed calls for credible data and the need to assure the world that numbers were not being manipulated.

“Given that kind of anxiety, it is important, just to convey to the world, that we are not manipulating anything... this is our data, to actually have an independent group look into it and certify that our data indeed is fine or suggest the changes needed,” he said.

The former RBI governor also said that India had good track record with credible data.

“We need to take a fairly clean, independent look at our statistics process. What I would think might be useful is to get a panel of independent experts to go through that... and think very carefully about the processes we follow,” he was quoted as saying.

