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India’s GDP Puzzle, Decoded: Formal–Informal Shifts, Volatile Deflators, and Smarter Metrics

India’s strong GDP prints often feel out of sync with daily experience. A simple two-sector lens—formal jackets and informal juices—clarifies how Nominal versus Real GDP, base-year choices, and deflator arithmetic shape the headline number. Since 2011, lower inflation, rapid digitisation and formalisation, and shifting consumption patterns have strained older methods and proxies. As visibility of…