India’s climate justice movement has a new opponent, and it isn’t a coal baron or a reluctant foreign donor but it is a spreadsheet. While activists rightly target fossil fuel subsidies and emissions targets, a quieter crisis is undermining the foundation of a fair green transition, which is the country’s own economic data.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s recent decision to retain India’s national accounts statistics at a “C” grade—its second-lowest rating—is not merely a technical footnote for statisticians, but a structural fault line. By obscuring who truly gains and who loses in the economy, this data deficit threatens to derail India’s promise of equitable, low-carbon development and just society. Fixing the numbers must be treated as a core climate-justice demand, as vital as phasing down coal or mobilising finance in this age of mis/disinformation.
The IMF’s rating reflects serious methodological shortcomings that hamper effective economic monitoring.
At its core, India’s GDP series relies on an outdated 2011-12 base year, uses wholesale price indices instead of producer prices, and suffers from large discrepancies between different estimation methods.
Most critically, it chronically under-measures the informal economy, where 85-90 percent of India’s workforce is employed. The result is a statistical fog like Delhi's pollution smog that masks economic reality rather than illuminating it. For climate policy, this fog is dangerous because when macroeconomic data cannot accurately capture the lived economy, decisions about where to direct scarce resources become guesses dressed up as analysis.
The Distorted Picture of India’s Green and Brown Economies
This failure plays out across critical battlegrounds, starting with distorted sectoral realities. Weak data systematically overstates the dynamism of carbon-intensive formal sectors while undervaluing the informal, service-sector, and rural activities that hold the key to a low-carbon future.
India’s national accounts estimate informal sector growth by extrapolating from sporadic benchmark surveys using indicators like industrial production indices and GST collections—methodology that the IMF warns leaves street vendors, small farmers, and waste pickers statistically invisible.
When policymakers see robust headline GDP growth, they see a thriving economy capable of absorbing the costs of climate action. What they miss is that this growth is often concentrated in formal, energy-intensive manufacturing. Meanwhile, the actual green economy—decentralised solar installations, sustainable agriculture, circular waste management—remains statistically invisible.
This distortion weakens the case for redirecting subsidies toward clean energy and adaptation; if the data shows formal manufacturing as the primary engine of growth, political logic dictates protecting that engine, even if it runs on coal.
The Invisible Green Economy Problem
Furthermore, unreliable investment data makes it nearly impossible to track real “green” investment or design just-transition packages for coal-dependent districts.
India needs trillions of dollars to meet its climate commitments, yet without accurate data, measuring where capital is going or what it achieves is nearly impossible. Consider the challenge in coal-dependent regions like Jharkhand, where a just transition requires knowing exactly how many people depend on coal, what alternative livelihoods exist, and how investment in renewables can replace lost income.
But when GDP data fails to capture informal employment or district-level economic activity, transition planning becomes aspirational rather than operational. Policymakers lack the baseline data to calculate compensation or retraining needs, effectively designing a just transition blindfolded. This data gap also undermines tracking of green investment itself; the government’s draft Climate Finance Taxonomy aims to channel capital toward sustainable activities, but its effectiveness depends on robust, disaggregated economic data.
A “C-grade” macroeconomic picture also undermines India’s credibility in international climate finance negotiations. At global summits, India’s ability to attract low-cost climate finance depends on transparent statistics that assure investors.
When the IMF questions the quality of India’s national accounts, it signals to global funds that the country cannot reliably monitor its own economic performance. This is a handicap as India seeks to operationalise carbon markets and mobilise international support.
If India cannot produce trustworthy data on GDP or investment, international donors have little reason to trust its calculations of emissions reductions. It leads to a paradox where India demands climate finance based on equity principles while failing to measure equity within its own borders.
The Human Cost of Statistical Invisibility
The human cost of this statistical invisibility is severe.
Women in India’s informal sector, who dominate climate-vulnerable occupations like agriculture and construction, face disproportionate climate impacts but remain statistically invisible.
When heatwaves reduce productivity or floods destroy micro-enterprises, the damage does not register in national accounts because the underlying economic activity was never fully counted in the first place.
Similarly, informal coal workers face a double jeopardy like their livelihoods are threatened by climate policy, yet their existence is barely acknowledged in economic statistics. Designing transition packages for workers the state refuses to count becomes an exercise in futility.
While reform is underway with plans for a new GDP series using a 2022-23 base year, these technical fixes are insufficient without a shift in political will under PM Narendra Modi. The climate justice movement must now ask some bold questions to the government:
Why should international climate funds trust India’s emissions reduction claims when we cannot trust its GDP numbers?
How many informal workers will remain statistically invisible when designing just transition packages for coal regions?
Will the new GDP series capture the economic contribution of street vendors installing solar lanterns, or will they remain in the shadows while coal-fired power plants bask in statistical sunshine?
For climate justice advocates, the message is clear. Fixing the numbers must sit alongside phasing down coal and financing the transition as a core demand. The climate movement should press for concrete reforms, including embedding “green GDP” and inequality metrics directly into the new series to reveal whether economic growth is genuinely sustainable or simply burning natural and human capital.
Transparency must be mandated, with open access to methodology and micro-data allowing civil society to hold the government accountable. Ultimately, high-quality data must be treated as essential climate infrastructure, worthy of public investment and political protection.
India’s “C-grade” data determines whose livelihoods count, which sectors receive investment, and whether the country can access the finance needed for a fair transition. The promise of a just, green development path depends on getting the math right. Without it, the transition will be built on a foundation of statistical sand.
(David Sathuluri is a recent graduate from Columbia and he is engaged with questions around caste, climate change and urban spaces. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author's. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)