Senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh on Monday alleged that the Centre has inflated rural wage growth figures through a change in the Labour Bureau’s sampling methodology, claiming the official data presents a misleading picture of India’s rural economy.
Ramesh said the Congress has consistently argued that stagnating real wages are at the heart of India’s economic slowdown, weakening consumption growth and discouraging private investment. Instead of addressing the problem, he alleged, the government was now attempting to project a rural wage “boom" through changes in statistical measurement.
Drawing parallels with earlier concerns over employment data, Ramesh said the Congress had in 2024 flagged what it described as a change in the definition of employment through the Reserve Bank of India, which was used to claim that 168 million jobs had been added since FY18.
He alleged that a similar exercise was now being carried out with rural wage data.
According to Ramesh, reported annual rural wage growth jumped from around 6 per cent to 17-18 per cent between June 2025 and March 2026. He also pointed to average daily wages rising by 12.7 per cent in a single month, describing the increase as unusually sharp.
The Congress leader claimed the apparent surge was the result of a methodological change introduced by the Labour Bureau without a press release or any disclosure on its website.
Under the revised sampling framework, workers from several northeastern states, Delhi and Goa were added to the survey sample. Ramesh alleged that while these regions account for only around 1.2 per cent of India’s workforce, they now constitute nearly 11 per cent of the total sample used for calculating rural wages.
He further claimed that average wages in these newly added regions are around 50-55 per cent higher than those in the earlier sample. According to him, this is because the new regions have a significantly lower share of agricultural employment and a relatively larger proportion of higher-skilled workers.
Citing an analysis by Systematix Research, Ramesh said the change in sample composition had created the impression of a sharp rise in rural wages.
He pointed to a “spliced counterfactual” estimate which, according to him, showed that annual rural wage growth would have been around 4.3 per cent had the earlier sampling framework been retained. Such a figure would represent the weakest rural wage growth in four years, in contrast to the official data showing growth of around 17 per cent in March 2026.
The charts shared by Ramesh show a sharp divergence between the reported wage series and the adjusted series after the methodology change. While official data indicates a strong acceleration in wage growth, the counterfactual estimate suggests wage growth continued to weaken.
Ramesh alleged that the episode reflected the government’s attempt to create a favourable economic narrative through changes in statistical methodology rather than improvements in underlying economic conditions.
”This is the entire political science of data doctoring at play,” he said.
