New Delhi: It was a déjà vu moment for Congress leaders last week when they came across a datasheet shared by the Centre in the Lok Sabha on per capita Net State Domestic Product for 2024–25. Karnataka, currently under Congress rule, has achieved what many other states can only aspire to: pushing its per capita Net State Domestic Product past the ₹2 lakh mark. A decade ago, it was just over ₹1 lakh. This figure now stands well above the national average of ₹1,14,710 for 2024-25, up 57.6% from ₹72,805 ten years ago.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, along with AICC general secretaries Randeep Singh Surjewala and Jairam Ramesh, gleefully shared the news on social media platform X, claiming that the five guarantees implemented by the Karnataka Congress government had driven this economic turnaround. Their confidence isn’t without merit. Through the four schemes, the government has pumped nearly a lakh crore into the state’s economy — a record by any measure. That deserves recognition.

However, whenever macroeconomic data is released, politicians are the first to spin it for advantage of narratives, well before economists analyse it in depth. So far, not a single rigorous analysis has emerged to either validate or challenge the Congress party’s claims. Against this backdrop, I made a deliberate attempt to spark a constructive debate by using alternative metrics — to highlight that macroeconomic numbers don’t always reflect the real, ground-level financial condition of people.
Data Sanctity

Since 2014, the Congress party has consistently dismissed economic data released by the NDA government, often accusing it of fudging numbers or drawing conclusions from flawed premises. Given that history, how can the same party now selectively embrace data highlighting Karnataka’s economic performance — especially when the figures come from the very same source? If most other government-released data is allegedly unreliable, why should this set of data be accepted as credible? And based solely on this data, can one conclusively say that Karnataka is doing an exceptional job?

It’s worth noting that long before the Congress took office in Karnataka in 2023, central government schemes had already been injecting money into the hands of ordinary citizens across India including Karnataka. Take, for example, the Mudra loan scheme and the PM-Kisan Samman........

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