The authors cherry-picked a restricted 14-country donor pool and selectively used expenditure-side GDP from Penn World Table 11.0 to engineer an artificial post-2014 deficit.
Rerun the identical model across standard IMF, World Bank, or Maddison datasets with a complete donor pool, and the result flips: Real India consistently outperforms its Synthetic twin.
The donor pool in the paper is literally the only donor pool we ever used for income.
We have no clear idea what our critic means by “a complete donor pool” except perhaps a very large one.
Finally, the main point of the paper is the large and pervasive decline in India's governance measures in VDEM.
Kanchan Gupta, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, questions the premise of a scholarly paper that faults Narendra Modi's performance on the 'growth and development' and 'good governance' fronts. Professors Kevin and Robin Grier of Texas Tech University respond.
Kanchan Gupta, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, questions the premise of a scholarly paper that faults Narendra Modi's performance on the 'growth and development' and 'good governance' fronts. Professors Kevin and Robin Grier of Texas Tech University respond.
Water cannons being used to disperse activists of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) as they protest against unemployment in the state, Siliguri, West Bengal, Friday, March 28, 2025. Photo: PTI
Editor's Note: On August 25, 2006, The Wire published a story, 'India Is Much Poorer and Far Less Free Under Modi Than It Would Have Been Without Him: Study', which reported the argument and findings of a scholarly paper posted on SSRN on August 12, 2026 – 'Promises, Promises: Governance and Growth in India under Modi and the BJP' [PDF] – by Professor Kevin Grier (Department of Political Science, Texas Tech University) and Professor Robin Grier (Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Texas Tech University).
Constructing a 'Synthetic India' from a weighted average of five countries whose composite performance most closely mirrored India from 1984-2013 (called the 'donor pool'), the authors compared the post 2014 outcomes of Real India and Synthetic India to test what Modi's contribution to the Indian economy and to Indian democracy has been.
They found that "for governance indicators including equality before the law, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and multiple indicators of democratic health, India dramatically underperformed its synthetic counterfactuals". With their study also establishing that the Indian economy underperformed as well, and that "by the end of the sample, income was about 10 percent below its counterfactual", Grier and Grier concluded: "Modi's rule is, at heart, a tale of broken promises."
On August 26, The Wire received a rejoinder to its news report from Kanchan Gupta, a senior official in the information and broadcasting ministry, with the heading 'Not ethical journalism' and a request that this be published. Gupta's rejoinder is published below, and appended to that is a response from Kevin Grier and Robin Grier, the authors of the paper whose findings The Wire reported.
§
Advertisement
Kanchan Gupta, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India writes:
The Wire's fanciful report relies entirely on a manufactured "Synthetic India", a weighted blend of five unrelated economies (38% Ethiopia, 28% China, 25% Bangladesh, 7% Pakistan, and 2% Philippines), to erase a decade of structural transformation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Advertisement
The cited working paper rests on a combinatorial fallacy. The authors cherry-picked a restricted 14-country donor pool and selectively used expenditure-side GDP from Penn World Table 11.0 to engineer an artificial post-2014 deficit. Rerun the identical model across standard IMF, World Bank, or Maddison datasets with a complete donor pool, and the result flips: Real India consistently outperforms its Synthetic twin.
The report’s governance claims rely exclusively on V-Dem, an opaque index of subjective judgements by anonymous experts. V-Dem absurdly rated India’s 2018 democracy no better than the 1975 Emergency and largely ignored massive pre-2014 corruption scandals, yet penalised India just as Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT) systematically dismantled middlemen and plugged fiscal leakages.
Advertisement
An honest counterfactual must project from reality. Trapped in the ‘Fragile Five’, India in 2013 suffered 10% inflation, a 4.8% current account deficit, depleted reserves ($275 billion), and a paralysed banking system under a hidden Twin Balance Sheet crisis. Without decisive leadership, India was headed toward runaway stagflation and a sovereign debt crisis.
Advertisement
Clearing this historic baggage delivered an unprecedented overhaul across key parameters:
Over 58 crore Jan Dhan accounts mobilized ₹3.08 lakh crore, providing the bedrock for UPI to settle nearly 50% of global real-time digital transactions.
The IBC recovered over ₹4 lakh crore, ensuring zero listed Indian banks carry net NPAs above 1%.
Forex reserves reached a record $716.9 billion, and inflation volatility has structurally eased.
Meanwhile, national highways expanded 1.6x, 7.8 lakh km of rural roads were built, and 100% village electrification wired 2.86 crore households.
Consequently, monthly GST collections touched ₹2.43 lakh crore.
Defense exports surged 10x to ₹38,424 crore
Extreme poverty collapsed to 5.3% (World Bank) and 10.8% (Rangarajan line), with 24.82 crore citizens escaping multidimensional poverty.
A rigged statistical blend of borrowed countries cannot overwrite the reality of an economy that has been banked, formalised, and structurally secured.
Manufacturing a phantom country to erase published macroeconomic data is not ethical journalism.
August 26, 2026
§
Professor Kevin Grier and Professor Robin Grier, Texas Tech University, respond:
Our critic has an impressive vocabulary, “fanciful”, “cherry picked”, “absurd”, “rigged”. But it is a case of थोथा चना बाजे घना — thothā chanā bāje ghanā (loosely, empty vessels make the most noise). Here we take a little time to set the record straight, realising that nothing but the exact outcome they desire will ever satisfy our critic.
The donor pool in the paper is literally the only donor pool we ever used for income. We have no clear idea what our critic means by “a complete donor pool” except perhaps a very large one. But this is exactly wrong as explained by the inventor of the method, Professor Alberto Abadie:
“Each of the units in the donor pool have to be chosen judiciously to provide a reasonable control for the treated unit. Including in the donor pool units that are regarded by the analyst to be unsuitable controls (because of large discrepancies in the values of their observed attributes or because of suspected large differences in the values of the unobserved attributes relative to the treated unit) is a recipe for bias.” And “The risk of over-fitting may also increase with the size of the donor pool… Under a factor model, a large number of units in the donor pool may create or exacerbate the bias of the synthetic control estimator” (Both quotes from his article “Using Synthetic Control” in the Journal of Economic Literature, June 2021)
We chose our donors as relatively large countries that shared characteristics with India. We ran the model once, found an excellent pre-treatment fit and that was that. There was no “cherry picking”. Synthetic Control (our method) is not designed to throw a huge number of countries into the hopper and see what falls out.
As far as datasets go, the Penn World Tables (PWT) is a highly respected and widely used source. Of the 9 synthetic control papers we have previously published, every time we use macroeconomic data for multiple countries (7 of the papers), we took it from the PWT. No other government spokesmen have complained, and we have studied Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Bangladesh among others.
In sum. We know what we are doing. We are not the ones shopping datasets and specifications to find something else. We honestly didn't care which way the results came out. We have no axe to grind. Our critic is using bluster in place of the scientific method. When we started the project, we were happy because any results would be of interest. Miracle? Great! Write it up. But it came out how it came out.
Furthermore, the paper itself points out that the income results are only marginally significant, and we are fine with saying that. The point is that India did not significantly outperform its synthetic counterfactual. And that doesn't mean that India hasn't grown in absolute terms. But that is not the same as measuring against a counterfactual. The question is, did the economy under the current government do better than what the 30 years before it would have predicted? Our answer is “no”. Our critic’s list of the government’s accomplishments is thus impressive but irrelevant, as no one is claiming that India has not improved at all.
Finally, the main point of the paper is the large and pervasive decline in India's governance measures in VDEM. VDEM is the standard source for governance measures in the political science field. We wouldn't be able to publish without using it. And multiple measures all show large significant declines (except corruption which shows a large significant increase). Our critic here is long on bluster and short on actual criticisms. For all these governance numbers to be wrong in the same direction, a fairly large group of experts somehow all decided to stick it to India’s current government. Unlikely at best. And VDEM is the opposite of “opaque”. VDem publicly documents its measurement procedures, releases coder-level data and uncertainty estimates, and uses a statistical measurement model designed specifically to account for disagreement, reliability, and systematic differences among expert coders. There is no VDEM conspiracy to undermine the Indian government.
Another source, Freedom House, has a category called, “free private expression of personal views without fear of surveillance or retribution”. It ranked India as 4/4 (the top) in 2012; it ranks it as only 2/4 in 2025. Given this current exchange, we can understand why.
August 28, 2026
The Wire welcomes debate on articles published.
The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
