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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, 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.

Kanchan Gupta, Officer on Special Duty at the 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.

The cited working paper rests on a combinatorial fallacy. The authors........

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