Last week, India’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) came out with new estimates of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. The GDP is essentially the market price of all “final” (as against intermediate) goods and services that are produced within the geographical boundaries of India.

The GDP shows the size of India’s economy. Broadly speaking, the bigger the size of the economy, the more prosperous a country is.

From time to time, GDP estimates have to be refreshed because every economy, especially one as dynamic as India’s, goes through several changes, such as the prices people pay, the goods and services they purchase, etc. To get a more accurate picture, MoSPI comes out with regular revisions of India’s GDP.

The new series takes a fresh guard from 2022-23 — that is, the financial year starting April 2022 and ending in March 2023. This now forms the new “base year” for GDP calculations. MoSPI has released the updated GDP for the years since and, in some time, it will release the GDP of the year before the new base year.

Here are the three biggest takeaways from the new GDP series.

As CHART 1 shows, the existing estimates of India’s GDP (the old estimates, represented by the orange bar), were bigger than the new ones (represented by blue bars). For instance, in 2022-23, MoSPI now estimates that India’s GDP was Rs 261 lakh crore and not Rs 269 lakh crore as previously understood. Similarly, for the current financial year, India’s GDP is not Rs 357 lakh crore but Rs 345 lakh crore.

As the next two charts will show, this change has implications all around.

According to the old GDP estimates (shown in orange bar in CHART 2), an average Indian’s annual income in the current financial year was just over Rs 2.5 lakhs. This is calculated by dividing the overall GDP by the size of the population.

To be sure, Rs 2,51,393 as income for the whole year is quite low as an average income both from a global perspective as well as domestic assessment. For instance, in the 2025 Budget the Indian government provided a income tax waiver to all those who earned less than Rs 12 lakhs per annum. That’s because the government wanted to provide relief and allow people earning upto Rs 1 lakh a month to save some more and hopefully have more money to spend.

The new GDP estimates (shown in blue bars) find that the average annual income in India in 2025-26 is even lower at Rs 2,43,180. That’s a monthly income of Rs 20,265.

3. India is further away from becoming a $5 trillion economy

While nominal GDP is calculated in Indian rupees, for global comparison, it is converted in US dollar terms by dividing the GDP by the exchange rate.

CHART 3 shows the growth of India’s GDP in US dollar terms according to the outgoing estimates (shown in orange columns) with the red bar marking the $5 trillion level. The Central government set the target of a $5 trillion economy back in 2018-19, with an intention of achieving it by 2024.

According to the old estimates, India’s GDP in 2025-26 had crossed the $4 trillion mark. But thanks to the new estimates pegged GDP at a lower level, as well as the fall in rupee’s exchange rate against the US dollar, India’s GDP is now at around $3.9 trillion, assuming an average exchange rate of Rs 88 to a dollar in the current financial year.