The Economic Survey's Grand Illusion: When Data Confesses What You Want to Hear

There is an old joke about an Indian businessman interviewing candidates for the position of chartered accountant at his firm. He asked each candidate a deceptively simple question: how much is ten plus twenty? Most answered thirty, confident in their arithmetic, and were promptly rejected. Finally, one candidate paused, leaned forward, and asked a counter-question: “How much do you want it to be?” He was hired on the spot.

I was reminded of this story while reading the Economic Survey 2025-26, authored by Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran, and presented to Parliament by the Ministry of Finance. The document is intellectually ambitious, unusually candid in places, and rich in data. It is also, beneath the celebratory veneer, an exercise in carefully calibrated narrative management, a 739-page answer to the question of how much the government wants the economic story to be.

There is another aphorism that comes to mind, often attributed to the economist Ronald Coase: if you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything. The Economic Survey does not quite torture its data. It is subtler than that. It selects which data to foreground and which to bury, invents metrics where convenient, compares across time periods that flatter the present, and attributes successes to policy while deflecting challenges onto global forces or state governments. The result is a document that tells a confident story of macroeconomic triumph while quietly admitting, often in subordinate clauses or footnotes, that the foundations are considerably more fragile than the headlines suggest.

This blog is an attempt to read the Survey as it deserves to be read: not as a neutral economic assessment, but as a political document that reveals as much in its silences and framings as in its data. My purpose is not to dispute that India has achieved respectable growth or that certain reforms have been implemented. It is to help the discerning reader understand what the Survey says, what it does not say, and why the gap between the two matters. Please read it with an open mind and ample time. This will be a long read.

The Confident Surface and the Quiet Admissions

The Survey opens with a triumphant narrative. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth is projected at 7.4 per cent for the financial year 2025-26 (FY26), based on the First Advance Estimates. The Central Government’s fiscal deficit has been halved from the pandemic peak of 9.2 per cent of GDP in FY21 to 4.8 per cent in FY25, and is budgeted at 4.4 per cent for FY26. Tax collections are buoyant, with direct taxes showing strong buoyancy and Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections recording multiple all-time highs in absolute terms. Public investment has been scaled up dramatically. Banks are healthy, with gross non-performing assets at multi-decade lows. Inflation is described as “tamed and anchored.” India’s potential growth rate, we are told, has been upgraded from 6.5 per cent to 7.0 per cent, reflecting the structural impact of reforms.

This is an impressive narrative. Rating agencies have noted that India received credit rating upgrades from Morningstar, DBRS, S&P Global Ratings, and Rating and Investment Information, Inc. (R&I) of Japan in May 2025, August, and September, respectively. The S&P upgrade, from BBB- to BBB, was India’s first upgrade from a major agency in nearly two decades. The government is understandably proud.

Yet, tucked inside the same document is a very different, far more sobering story. The Indian rupee, the Survey admits, “underperformed in 2025” and is “punching below its weight”—its valuation does not accurately reflect India’s “stellar economic fundamentals.” The Lowy Institute’s Power Gap Index is cited to show that India has the lowest power-gap score in Asia, excluding Russia and North Korea, meaning we are operating far below our strategic potential. The Survey constructs three scenarios for 2026: a “best case” of continued managed disorder, a middle scenario of disorderly multipolar breakdown, and a lower-probability scenario of systemic shock cascade where leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, geopolitical escalation, and financial strain feed on each other to create a crisis worse than 2008. In all three scenarios, the Survey acknowledges, India faces the same binding risk: disruption of capital flows and consequent pressure on the rupee.

In other words, the government’s own document admits that, despite strong fundamentals, global capital is not convinced; that, despite strong growth, our currency is weak; and that, despite all the reforms, we remain structurally dependent on volatile foreign capital with no clear exit from that dependency.

The core argument of the Survey can be summarised in one line: India is doing everything right, the world is doing everything wrong, and the costs of that mismatch are falling unfairly on us. It is an elegant explanation. It is also a convenient one.

The Structural Confession the Survey Buries

The most intellectually honest section of the Economic Survey is where it admits that India’s high cost of capital is not a short-term monetary policy issue but a structural consequence of our external position. A country that persistently runs current account deficits and depends on foreign savings, the Survey concedes, must by definition pay a risk premium to global capital. In contrast, economies that generate sustained external surpluses (through exports, productivity, and financial depth) can finance domestic investment cheaply and stably. India’s long-run challenge, therefore, is not merely to manage liquidity or credit cycles, but to transform itself into a surplus-generating economy.

This is a significant admission, and one that sits awkwardly with the triumphalist narrative. The political messaging typically suggests that high interest rates and tight credit are transient phenomena that can be managed through monetary policy adjustments or banking reforms. The Survey quietly says the opposite: as long as India remains structurally dependent on foreign savings, capital will remain relatively expensive. The much-touted domestic savings and investment story has not solved the basic external constraint.

Consider the balance of payments data provided by the Survey itself. In the first half of FY26, India recorded a balance of payments deficit of 6.4 billion United States dollars (USD), compared to a surplus of USD 23.8 billion in the corresponding period of the previous year. Foreign portfolio investment (FPI) saw net outflows of USD 3.9 billion between April and December 2025, compared to net inflows of USD 10.6 billion in the same period of the previous year. The Survey attributes this to “elevated uncertainty” and “increased interest in AI-related financial investments in countries such as the US, Taiwan, and Korea.” That may be true. It is also an admission that when global capital has options, it is not choosing India despite our “stellar” fundamentals.

The rupee depreciated approximately 6.5 per cent against the US dollar between April 2025 and January 2026. The Survey’s response to this is remarkable in its spin. It notes that an undervalued rupee “does not hurt” because it offsets the impact of higher American tariffs, and there is no threat of higher inflation from crude oil imports at current prices. This is damage control dressed as analysis. When a government document starts explaining why currency weakness is actually beneficial, the reader should recognise that something has gone wrong that cannot be easily explained away.

The 7 Per Cent Potential Growth: Unfalsifiable Optimism

One of the headline claims of the Survey is that India’s potential growth rate has been revised upward from 6.5 per cent to 7.0 per cent. This is presented as evidence that cumulative reforms have structurally elevated the economy’s productive capacity. The methodology deserves scrutiny.

The Survey uses a standard Cobb-Douglas production function framework, where potential output is a function of capital stock, labour input, and total factor productivity (TFP). The assumptions are revealing. Capital stock growth is assumed at 7.6 per cent, matching the pre-pandemic average of FY13-FY20 and implying that investment will return to its long-term trend. Labour input growth is assumed at 2.6 per cent, based on rising formalisation and participation rates. Trend TFP growth is assumed at 1.9 per cent, the same as the pre-pandemic average, on the expectation that digital infrastructure, logistics improvements, and regulatory simplification will boost efficiency.

Each of these assumptions is plausible in isolation. Together, they produce an estimate that conveniently cannot be falsified in the short term. If actual growth falls below 7 per cent, the explanation will be “external headwinds” or “global uncertainty.” The potential remains credited to reforms; the shortfall is attributed to forces beyond the government’s control. This is not analysis; it is insurance.

The Survey also introduces a “nowcasting model” that uses 17 high-frequency indicators to estimate GDP growth in real time. The model predicts 7 per cent growth for the third quarter of FY26. The out-of-sample root mean squared error (RMSE) is 0.87 percentage points—meaning the actual growth could be anywhere from 6.1 to 7.9 per cent and still be within the model’s error margin. By institutionalising an internal nowcasting model, the government creates a “scientific” basis for optimistic projections that cannot be externally verified until actual data arrives months later. When the Advance Estimates are eventually revised downward, as they consistently have been in recent years, the nowcast will have served its political purpose.

The Centre Versus States: Shifting Blame While Centralising Power

If the external sector sections reveal structural vulnerability beneath a veneer of confidence, the fiscal chapters reveal political intent beneath a veneer of technocracy.

The Central Government’s fiscal story is carefully constructed: deficit down from 9.2 per cent of GDP in FY21 to 4.8 per cent in FY25; revenue expenditure reduced from 13.6 to 10.9 per cent of GDP, below the pre-pandemic average; capital expenditure elevated to around 3 per cent of GDP, with effective capital expenditure reaching 4 per cent. The Centre, in this telling, is disciplined, targeted, and growth-friendly.

State governments receive a very different treatment. Their combined revenue balance has swung from near-balance in FY19 to a deficit of 0.7 per cent of GDP in FY25, with ten states moving from surplus to deficit over this period. The Survey ties this deterioration to “rising revenue deficits and unconditional cash transfers”. It warns that such transfers crowd out growth-enhancing capital expenditure and harm long-term incentives for “self-improvement, upskilling, and employability.”

The phrase “unconditional cash transfers” appears repeatedly in the Survey, always in the context of state-level welfare schemes. An entire box is dedicated to warning about their fiscal and behavioural consequences. The Survey estimates that aggregate spending on such programmes (particularly those targeted at women, via schemes such as Ladli Behen of MP) is approximately 1.7 lakh crore rupees for FY26. It cites a single Indian Express article to claim that these transfers “adversely affect female labour force participation.” It invokes a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) meta-analysis to argue that unconditional transfers do not consistently improve child nutrition or educational outcomes, nor enable sustained exits from poverty.

What the Survey conspicuously omits is the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN), the Central Government’s flagship scheme, which has disbursed over 2.2 lakh crore rupees in periodic, unconditional cash payments to farmers. PM-KISAN is structurally identical to the state-level schemes the Survey condemns: it provides cash transfers to a defined population without conditions on behaviour or utilisation. Yet PM-KISAN is celebrated as “Direct Benefit Transfer,” whereas state schemes such as Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin or Karnataka’s Gruha Lakshmi are labelled “unconditional cash transfers” that erode incentives.

The asymmetry is not economic; it is political. When the Centre transfers cash, it is welfare reform. When states transfer cash, it is populism. The Survey is not conducting a dispassionate analysis; it is building a narrative for the 2026 state elections and beyond.

When Efficiency Means Control

The fiscal federalism architecture is being quietly re-engineered, and the Survey provides a window into how this is being done.

The shift to just-in-time fund releases via Single Nodal Account–Samyochit Pranali Ekikrit Shighra Hastantaran (SNA-SPARSH) and the Treasury Single Account (TSA) is presented as a triumph of cash management. Idle balances parked with implementing agencies under Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) have fallen from approximately 1.67 lakh crore rupees in April 2024 to about 0.4 lakh crore by mid-January 2026. Interest costs fall, leakage risks fall, and efficiency rises. All of that is probably true.

But so does state-level autonomy. The earlier “credit-push” model released bulk transfers to states, which then held funds in their accounts and spent according to their own priorities and timelines. The new “debit-pull” model releases funds only when expenditure is actually incurred, through integrated systems linked to the Union government’s Public Financial Management System (PFMS) and the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) e-Kuber platform. Control over timing and conditions of release effectively shifts to the Centre.

In a politically polarised environment, this matters enormously. “Technical” bottlenecks, prioritisation decisions, and sequencing choices can become instruments of quiet pressure on opposition-ruled states. The efficiency gains are real, but so is the centralisation of fiscal control. The Survey frames this as modernisation; it is equally a power shift.

The document adds a new disciplining instrument: global bond investors. With Indian government bonds now included in global indices, the Survey argues that investors will assess “general government” fiscal metrics (not just New Delhi’s numbers), which means that state-level fiscal indiscipline can raise the sovereign’s borrowing costs. India’s 10-year bond yield is 6.7 per cent, the Survey notes, while Indonesia’s is 6.3 per cent, despite both countries having the same BBB credit rating. The implication is that states’ fiscal choices are casting a shadow on the sovereign’s borrowing cost.

On the face of it, this is an accurate observation. In practice, it will be deployed as a political threat: if states insist on running social protection regimes that the Union dislikes, they can be blamed for jeopardising India’s global financial credibility. The Centre is using the optics of international capital markets to constrain democratic fiscal choices at the state level.

The Politics of “Good” Welfare and “Bad” Welfare

The welfare narrative is central to the Survey’s political project. Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) is held up as the definitive success story of the decade. Over ten years, DBT is credited with reducing leakages by 3.48 lakh crore rupees while expanding beneficiary coverage nearly sixteen-fold, from about 11 crore to 176 crore. The Survey celebrates the removal of 2.12 crore “ineligible” beneficiaries from the National Food Security Act (NFSA) rolls and the cleaning of 8.51 crore records through database integration and Aadhaar seeding.

The financial savings are precisely quantified. The human cost is not accounted for.

There is no serious discussion in the Survey of wrongful exclusion of households removed from food security rolls due to data errors, failed biometric authentication, or local power dynamics. (I have given a few examples here in one of my previous blogs) There is no presentation of error rates in Aadhaar seeding, no analysis of grievance redress mechanisms, and no acknowledgement that any large-scale automated exclusion system carries inherent risks of excluding the genuinely deserving. The government counts every rupee saved, but not a single person wrongly denied food.

The treatment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) follows the same pattern. The Survey acknowledges that the scheme expanded female participation to 58.1 per cent, improved digitisation and Aadhaar seeding, and created assets that are now geotagged and monitored. It then pivots to a catalogue of failures: leakages, a mismatch between expenditure and physical work, the use of machinery in violation of the labour-intensive mandate, fake attendance, and collusion. The conclusion is that the “architecture has reached its limits.”

The solution, presented in December 2025, is the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin (VB G-RAM G), which replaces MGNREGA. The new legislation increases the guarantee from 100 to 125 days per household, raises the administrative expenditure cap from 6 to 9 per cent, removes the earlier “disentitlement” clause that allowed states to refuse unemployment allowance, and introduces four “strategic” focus areas.

On paper, this looks like an upgrade. But before celebrating the new label, an honest assessment would acknowledge that many of MGNREGA’s implementation failures stemmed from chronic underfunding, delayed wage payments, and administrative design choices made under this government, not from some inherent flaw in the idea of a rights-based rural employment guarantee. The scheme was starved, and its starvation is now invoked to justify its rebranding as a new entity with greater central control.

The structural and political choices made over the years are quietly converted into a technocratic indictment of an entire architecture. The cure, coincidentally, is a model with new central branding.

The Inflation Metric That Does Not Exist

On inflation, the Survey introduces a curious metric: “core inflation excluding gold and silver.” This is not standard economic terminology. It does not appear in RBI publications, International Monetary Fund (IMF) methodologies, or mainstream economic literature.

The standard Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation reading for FY26 (April-December) is 1.7 per cent, driven primarily by a sharp disinflation in food prices. Core inflation (which excludes food and fuel) stands at 4.3 per cent, indicating that underlying price pressures remain. The Survey then presents “core inflation excluding gold and silver” at 2.9 per cent, arguing that the higher core figure is “largely influenced by price spikes in precious metals” and that “adjusting for these, underlying inflation pressures appear materially softer.”

Gold and silver prices rose sharply in 2025 amid global uncertainty, with gold climbing from approximately USD 2,607 to USD 4,315 per ounce. By removing these items, the Survey produces a flattering inflation reading. But the logic is circular: if we exclude everything that rose in price, inflation will always look low. The invention of new metrics to produce convenient numbers is not analysis; it is arithmetic in the service of a narrative.

The Survey also fails to engage seriously with the persistence of protein inflation (milk, eggs, meat, and fish), which affects household nutrition, or with regional inflation disparities that its own data acknowledge but do not analyse.

Employment: The Missing Number

Nowhere in the Economic Survey will you find a simple answer to the most basic question: how many net new jobs were created in FY25-26?

You will find Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) percentages. You will find changes in the Unemployment Rate (UR). You will find Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) payroll additions, which measure formalisation of existing employment rather than creation of new jobs. You will find phrases like “improving employment conditions” and “steady job market.”

What you will not find is a falsifiable number.

The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data for the second quarter of FY26 show 56.2 crore people aged 15 and above employed, with 8.7 lakh net new jobs created compared to the previous quarter. On a narrow reading of quarterly changes, this sounds positive. The broader picture is less flattering. Agriculture still accounts for 42.4 per cent of total employment. Self-employment accounts for 55.8 per cent. Casual labour makes up 18.9 per cent. That is, a substantial share of India’s workforce remains concentrated in low-productivity, low-security forms of work.

The Survey celebrates the rise in female labour force participation from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24. It does not adequately grapple with what the Time Use Survey 2024 reveals: women spend, on average, 363 minutes per day on unpaid domestic work and caregiving, compared to 123 minutes for men. Their combined paid and unpaid work time exceeds that of men. The rise in female participation sits atop an already crushing, unpaid workload—a “double shift” that is not being addressed by substantial investments in public care infrastructure. The Survey speaks of “flexible work” and “childcare facilities” but offers no roadmap for reducing the burden that women already carry.

The gig economy is treated with similar rhetorical duality. Gig workers grew from 77 lakh in FY21 to 120 lakh in FY25, now over 2 per cent of the workforce. The Survey acknowledges that approximately 40 per cent of gig workers earn less than 15,000 rupees per month, experience income volatility, have limited access to credit, and are subject to algorithmic control over work allocation and performance monitoring. Yet the policy response is limited to noting that the Code on Social Security has “recognised” gig workers. There is no discussion of minimum wage floors, collective bargaining rights, or how a worker earning less than 15,000 rupees monthly in a major city is supposed to achieve the “self-improvement, upskilling, and employability” that the Survey prescribes as the alternative to unconditional transfers.

The architecture of obfuscation is itself the message. If the employment story were genuinely strong, the Survey would lead with absolute numbers.

Manufacturing Versus Services: A Selective Strategy

The Survey’s treatment of India’s external sector reveals a clear ideological preference for manufacturing over services, even though services have accounted for the bulk of the work.

Since 2020, the compounded annual growth rate of total exports has been 9.4 per cent, but merchandise exports have grown at only 6.4 per cent. Services exports have “done much of the heavy lifting,” the Survey concedes, stabilising the current account and providing foreign exchange earnings. The services trade surplus has grown steadily, partially offsetting the persistent merchandise trade deficit.

Yet the Survey insists that services are not enough. It argues that services exports “do not systematically compel broad upgrades in state capacity, as successful firms can bypass weak institutions, relocate easily, and generate limited economy-wide pressure on governments to reform. Unlike manufacturing exports, they do not impose hard fiscal, employment, or logistical constraints on the State, allowing institutional weakness to persist even alongside globally competitive firms.”

This is a striking admission. The Survey suggests that India’s most successful export sectors (information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITeS), business services, and financial services) have not compelled the government to become more capable. Manufacturing, by contrast, would compel the state to address logistics, power, land, and labour constraints, as manufacturing cannot bypass these constraints.

The logic has merit as a structural diagnosis. But it also serves as a justification for industrial policy that favours manufacturing interests over services, for trade deals that prioritise goods over services market access, and for Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes that channel public resources toward capital-intensive sectors with limited employment generation. The Survey does not present compelling evidence that PLI schemes have generated broad-based employment rather than capital-intensive island successes.

The India-European Union Free Trade Agreement (FTA), concluded after years of negotiation, is presented as a strategic lever to embed India in high-tech value chains and diversify away from China-centric manufacturing. The strategic framing is intentional: it positions the FTA as a national security imperative rather than a commercial negotiation, casting opposition to the agreement as resistance to India’s strategic rise.

The Entrepreneurial State Without the Political State

The final conceptual pillar of the Survey is the “entrepreneurial state.” Borrowing from economist Mariana Mazzucato and drawing on political scientist Michael Beckley’s framework, the Survey defines power as the product of productive force, institutional quality, and strategic concentration. It calls for a state that acts under uncertainty, sets mission-oriented goals, structures risk rather than avoids it, uses public procurement to foster innovation, and shifts from compliance and control to trust-based, technology-driven regulation.

On paper, this is an attractive vision. The Survey celebrates “mission-mode” platforms in semiconductors and green hydrogen, deregulation compacts with state governments, and shifts toward risk-based regulation. It points to process reforms such as just-in-time fund flows, digital tax nudges, and e-way bill redesign as evidence that the state is transforming.

What the Survey does not acknowledge is the deep tension between entrepreneurial policymaking and the reality of Indian governance. Bureaucrats are understandably risk-averse because adventurous decisions can become liabilities years later under investigation by vigilance agencies. Regulatory discretion, which is essential for entrepreneurial action, is also the gateway to cronyism. The Survey offers no institutional safeguards to prevent “mission-mode” policymaking from degenerating into selective favouritism.

There is a large gap between the theory of an agile, experimental state and the reality of centralised, often politicised decision-making. The Survey discusses the entrepreneurial state without discussing the political state—the distribution of power, the accountability of discretion, and the risks of capture. That silence is telling.

The Right to Not Know: When Transparency Becomes “Idle Curiosity”

Perhaps the most revealing section of the Economic Survey is one that has nothing to do with growth rates or fiscal deficits. Buried in the governance chapter is a call for “re-examination” of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, India’s landmark transparency legislation.

The Survey acknowledges that the RTI Act is “a powerful democratic reform and a tool for accountability and against corruption.” It then proceeds to argue that the law “carries risks of becoming an end in itself,” where “disclosures are celebrated regardless of contribution to better governance.” The Act, we are told, was “never intended as a tool for idle curiosity” nor “as a mechanism to micromanage government from the outside.”

The proposed “adjustments” are extensive. The Survey suggests exempting brainstorming notes, working papers, and draft comments until they form part of the final record of decision-making. It recommends protecting service records, transfers, and confidential staff reports. Most significantly, it proposes exploring a “narrowly defined” ministerial veto, subject to parliamentary oversight, to guard against disclosures that could “unduly constrain governance.”

The justification offered is that officials may “hold back” if every draft or remark is subject to disclosure, resorting to “cautious language and fewer bold ideas.” The Survey draws comparisons with the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden, arguing that those countries provide broader exemptions for “deliberative process” documents. India’s RTI Act, by contrast, leaves “far less space” for such carve-outs, with file notings, internal opinions, and draft notes falling “squarely within the Act’s definition of information.”

The argument concludes with a statement that deserves to be read carefully: “Democracy best functions when officials can deliberate freely and are then held accountable for the decisions they endorse, not for every half-formed thought expressed along the way.”

This is a remarkable passage. It appears in the same document that celebrates the “entrepreneurial state,” which must act under uncertainty and take risks; advocates “mission-mode” platforms with broad executive discretion; promotes “trust-based” regulation that reduces compliance burdens; and calls for process reforms that shift control from rules to administrative judgment.

The pattern is now complete. The Survey wants a state with more discretion, more flexibility, more room for “bold ideas”, and less citizen oversight of how that discretion is exercised. The entrepreneurial state, it turns out, requires protection from the inconvenience of transparency.

The irony should not be lost on the reader. This is a document that itself practices the selective disclosure it now seeks to legalise. It buries unflattering admissions in subordinate clauses. It invents metrics to produce convenient readings. It frames the same policies differently depending on whether the Centre or the states implement them. It tells a confident story while quietly acknowledging fragility. And it now argues that such practices should be shielded from public scrutiny because transparency might inhibit “bold” policymaking.

The RTI Act has been under sustained pressure for years, including delays in appointments to the Central Information Commission, inadequate staffing at state commissions, and general administrative hostility to disclosure. The Survey proposes converting that de facto weakening into a de jure exemption.

There is a term for governance that demands trust while resisting verification. It is not “entrepreneurial.” It is not “agile.” It is simply opaque.

Climate and AI: Hedging Against Risks the Survey Itself Identifies

The treatment of climate and artificial intelligence reveals a government that recognises systemic risks but stops short of committing to concrete safeguards.

On climate, the Survey critiques “premature” decarbonisation in advanced economies, citing examples of grid instability in Spain and the Netherlands to warn against high-renewables systems without adequate storage, grid upgrades, and dispatchable capacity. It argues for a “green, competitive growth path” that protects energy security, industrial competitiveness, and fiscal space, advocating “sequenced” investments and climate finance reforms.

The call for sequencing is technically valid. Rapid, front-loaded transitions can destabilise energy systems and raise industrial costs. But without clear domestic targets and transparent progress indicators, “pragmatism” risks becoming a cover for slow-walking the transition and locking India into polluting infrastructure. The Survey does not commit to quantified interim milestones on renewable capacity, storage, or emissions intensity that could be used to hold the government accountable.

On artificial intelligence, the Survey is surprisingly candid about risks. It notes that technology companies have shifted more than USD 120 billion in data centre spending off their balance sheets through special-purpose vehicles funded by Wall Street investors. It cites the chief executive of International Business Machines (IBM) questioning the economics of Large Language Model (LLM)-based AI. It acknowledges that a correction in AI-related investments could cascade across financial markets and the real economy.

Yet when it turns to domestic policy, the Survey offers governance frameworks, phased roadmaps, and “development-oriented” approaches without specifying how Indian regulators and financial institutions will ring-fence the domestic system from a global AI-finance correction. The risk is correctly identified; the mitigation is left vague.

What the Survey Does Not Discuss

The absences in the Economic Survey are as revealing as its contents.

There is no discussion of the status of trade negotiations with the United States, even though the Survey notes that India was expected to reach an early agreement and was surprised by the imposition of an additional 25 per cent tariff in August 2025. There is no engagement with the Adani investigations and their implications for foreign investor confidence. There is no analysis of India’s trade dependence on China, which would complicate the “strategic indispensability” narrative. There is no presentation of state-wise GDP growth breakdowns that would allow assessment of whether growth is broad-based or concentrated. There is no discussion of non-performing assets in the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector, which would contradict the “healthy balance sheets” claim. There is no engagement with electoral bonds data and its implications for the relationship between corporate interests and policy decisions.

The Survey mentions the renaming of MGNREGA to VB G-RAM G only in a footnote. It does not explain why a scheme that required rebranding also apparently needed a new acronym that happens to include “Viksit Bharat”—the government’s political slogan.

Reading Between the Lines

The Economic Survey 2025-26 is not a neutral document. It is a political document produced by political actors for political purposes. This does not render it worthless; it contains valuable data and occasionally honest admissions. But it must be read critically, with attention to framing, omission, and the strategic deployment of evidence.

The patterns, once identified, are consistent throughout.

When the Survey celebrates growth, it selects metrics and time periods that flatter the present. When it praises fiscal consolidation, it downplays the one-time revenues, such as exceptional RBI dividend transfers of 2.68 lakh crore rupees, that underpin the improvement. When it condemns state-level welfare as incentive-destroying populism, it exempts structurally identical central schemes from the same critique. When standard metrics produce uncomfortable readings, it invents new ones: “core inflation excluding gold and silver” is not a measure used in any central bank publication or IMF methodology; it exists only because it produces the number the narrative requires. When it projects potential growth of 7 per cent, it constructs assumptions that cannot be falsified in the short term, ensuring that any shortfall can be attributed to external headwinds. In contrast, the potential remains credited to reforms. When it blames global forces for rupee weakness, it avoids asking why global capital is choosing other destinations despite India’s proclaimed “stellar fundamentals.”

The Survey admits (often inadvertently), in subordinate clauses and technical footnotes that India remains structurally dependent on volatile foreign capital; that the rupee is underperforming its supposed fundamentals; that state-level fiscal space is being systematically squeezed; that employment quality remains poor despite improving headline metrics; that women carry crushing unpaid work burdens atop their rising labour force participation; and that both climate and AI transitions carry systemic risks for which no concrete safeguards are proposed. These admissions are treated as technical challenges within an otherwise triumphant story, rather than as symptoms of deeper structural constraints or of the consequences of political choices made over the past decade.

The Centre-versus-states narrative is particularly instructive. The Survey constructs a world in which the Central Government is disciplined, reform-minded, and growth-oriented. At the same time, state governments are fiscally profligate, prone to “populism,” and in need of external discipline, whether from conditional fund releases, performance-linked borrowing limits, or the scrutiny of global bond investors. That PM-KISAN and Ladki Bahin are structurally identical cash transfer programmes, distinguished only by which level of government brands them, is a fact the Survey cannot acknowledge without collapsing its own framework. The asymmetry is not analytical; it is electoral.

The fiscal architecture is being quietly constructed (through just-in-time fund releases, debit-pull mechanisms, and integrated treasury platforms) and may indeed improve efficiency. It also shifts real-time control over spending from states to the Centre, creating leverage that can be deployed selectively in a polarised political environment. The Survey presents this as modernisation. It is equally a transfer of power.

And then there is the RTI proposal.

If the reader takes away only one insight from this analysis, it should be this: the Economic Survey’s call for “re-examination” of the Right to Information Act is not a peripheral suggestion. It is the logical culmination of everything else the document argues. The Survey wants an “entrepreneurial state” that can operate in uncertain conditions, take risks, exercise discretion, run mission-mode platforms, and shift from rigid compliance to flexible, trust-based regulation. It now explicitly argues that such a state requires protection from the inconvenience of transparency that file notings, draft comments, and internal deliberations should be shielded from disclosure lest officials resort to “cautious language and fewer bold ideas.”

The Indian businessman who hired the chartered accountant willing to make ten plus twenty equal whatever was needed understood something fundamental about the relationship between numbers and narrative. The Economic Survey understands it too. It has produced a document where growth is 7 per cent, inflation is under 3 per cent (if you exclude what rose in price), employment is improving (though no one will tell you how many jobs were created), fiscal consolidation is on track (supported by windfalls that may not recur), states are the problem (except when the Centre does the same thing), and the rupee’s weakness reflects global injustice rather than domestic shortcomings.

And now, the Survey suggests, citizens should not be permitted to examine too closely how these conclusions were reached. The deliberative process must be protected. Bold ideas require shadows in which to germinate.

The reader’s task is to refuse that bargain. To remember that ten plus twenty still equals thirty, regardless of what anyone wants it to be. To read official documents not as authoritative accounts but as political texts that reveal as much in their silences and framings as in their data. To insist that a government that demands the discretion of an entrepreneur must accept the accountability of a public servant.

The Economic Survey 2025-26 is, in its own way, a remarkable document. It tells us not only what the government wants us to believe about the economy, but also what kind of state it wishes to become: one with more power and less scrutiny, more flexibility and less transparency, more narrative control and less citizen oversight.

That, perhaps, is the most important number in the entire 739 pages. And it is one the Survey very much hopes you will not count.