Deepak Shenoy at Capitalmind has an excellent post dissecting the 4.2% drop in the Index of Industrial Production in October. One of the keys to the drop, he says, is that this year both Diwali and Dasara fell in October, and since factories give workers off for these two festivals output falls. He has an informative (but ugly) graph showing this:
I was talking to a retailer recently and he was talking about sales in terms of Indian festivals – like Diwali and Dasara and so on. Retail analytics, we figured, need to take into account things like “Diwali sale”, “Aashada sale” and so on.
So while we have been using the Gregorian calendar for most purposes, it seems like our business cycle still follows the Hindu calendar. From this perspective, issuing statistics based on Gregorian months (such as October YoY IIP) is simply wrong, and has the ability to mislead.
I hereby propose that we go back to our roots and start publishing these YoY statistics on Hindu months. The only problem is we won’t know how to deal with the “adhika maasas”.
Problem with publishing these statistics on a Hindu calendar is that the baseline income (salaries) and spends are based on the Gregorian calendar. So, while the new stats will better explain annual, festive spending spikes, the separation of baseline economic cycle and Hindu calendar cycle may introduce its own anomalies.
i know i know 🙂
The post was in jest!