Congress Claims Government is Doctoring Figures

New Delhi: The Congress on Monday alleged that the Modi government had “adjusted the rural wage rise” and that it was produced by a methodological change.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh He stated that in 2024, his party, through the RBI, claimed that the Modi government changed the definition of employment to show a boom in job creation and that 168 million jobs have been added since FY 2018.

Ramesh claimed that the RBI leadership was later rewarded for their efforts by being appointed to important posts in the Modi government.

In X, he said that the Modi government is now trying the same for rural wages.

“We have consistently flagged that the root cause of India’s economic slowdown is stagnation in real wages, which has weakened consumption growth and deterred private investment. Having failed to correct this original sin, the Modi Government is now ‘correcting’ rural wage growth,” Ramesh said.

He noted that reported annual rural wage growth increased from 6% to 17-18% between June 2025 and March 2026, with average daily wages increasing by 12.7% in a single month.

“This ‘boom’ in wages was produced by a methodological change. The Labor Bureau, without any press release or website disclosure, adopted a new sampling frame that brought workers from several northeastern states, NCT Delhi and Goa into the sample pool,” he said.

Although India accounts for only 1.2% of its workforce, these new data collection points account for 11% of the total sample, Ramesh said.

“Most importantly, their average wages are 50-55% above the old sample because the newly added regions have much less agricultural employment and more highly skilled labour,” Ramesh said. he said.

In fact, analysis of wage data shows that real wage growth will be around 4.3% annually, the weakest growth in four years.

“This is the whole political science of manipulating data,” Ramesh said, taking a dig at the government.