The Indian economy performed better under the Narendra Modi administration than under Dr Manmohan Singh.

There have been doubts about the correctness of GDP data after the CSO updated base year for GDP calculation to 2011-12. The claim is unverifiable.

There have been doubts about the correctness of GDP data after the CSO updated base year for GDP calculation to 2011-12. The claim is unverifiable. In January 2015, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) updated base year for GDP calculation to 2011-12, replacing the old series base year of 2004-05, as per the recommendations of the National Statistical Commission. The new series includes corporate information from the MCA21 database of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs instead of the results obtained from the RBI study on company finances. The new series is also compliant with the United Nations guidelines in System of National Accounts-2008.

The GDP in previous years had been revised according to the new base year for a fair comparison. The government released a report on August 2018, with adjusted GDP numbers for fiscal years 2005-12 using new methodology with FY12 as the base year. The report stated that the Indian economy clocked a 10.08 percent growth rate in 2006-07 under then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the highest since the liberalization of the economy in 1991. The August report showed the previous UPA governments doing better than the NDA government.

However, another back series report with recalibrated data published in November 2018 with adjusted GDP numbers for fiscal years 2005-12 showed that under the BJP-led NDA government, the Indian economy registered higher average growth than achieved during the UPA years. The average growth for the UPA years after the back-series revision for FY06 to FY12 declines to 6.82% from 7.75%, below the 7.35% clocked during the four years of the current NDA government.

In January 2019, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (Mospi) published the revised growth estimates for fiscal 2017, raising growth for that year by 1.1 percentage points to 8.2 percent, the highest in a decade. A group of 108 economists and social scientists criticized the report saying the results were far-fetched because the demonetization exercise in November 2016 had sucked out 86 percent of the cash in circulation, leading to widespread closures of small businesses and manufacturing units across the country.

A report published by Mint on May 10, 2019, stated a study conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) in the 12 months ended June 2017. The study found that as much as 38 percent of companies that are part of the MCA21 database of companies and have been used in India's GDP calculations could not be traced or had been wrongly classified. This led to economists raising questions about the authenticity of the GDP calculation process.

In June 2019, Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser (CEA) to the finance ministry, claimed in a 33-page research paper published at Harvard University, that 2.5 percentage points might have overestimated India's gross domestic product (GDP) numbers between 2011-12 and 2016-17 for each year. The report had been rejected by the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, which defended its GDP calculations.

The GDP data published on the Reserve Bank of India website and the World Bank reflects the revised GDP data as per the conventions adopted in 2015. Due to widespread doubts about the GDP data, the claim is unverifiable.