GDP
Also: Gross Domestic Product
Background and evolution
GDP as a single headline number is a product of the 1930s and 1940s. The economist Simon Kuznets built the first official national income accounts for the United States, and the Second World War made governments want one figure for the economy's capacity. Kuznets himself warned that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.
In India, early estimates came from Dadabhai Naoroji, whose figures fed the drain of wealth argument, and later from V. K. R. V. Rao. After Independence the P. C. Mahalanobis-led National Income Committee (1949) laid the foundations of official estimates, which today are produced by the National Statistics Office under MoSPI. In 2026 the base year moved to 2022–23, with new data sources such as GST records.
This page deliberately does not repeat how GDP is computed. For the production, income and expenditure methods, the GVA–GDP bridge and the difference between GDP, GNP and NNP, use the linked deep-dive lesson. Here we follow GDP as it appears across the rest of the syllabus.
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Last reviewed: 23 October 2026 · Original UPSCPrep.in content.