India's GDP Growth Since COVID: A Chart-by-Chart Look

India's GDP growth path since the COVID-19 shock is one of the sharpest V-shaped disruptions in the country's post-liberalisation economic history — a record quarterly contraction followed by a rebound distorted by base effects, and then several years of gradual normalisation toward a more typical trend growth rate. Looking at the quarterly year-on-year growth series makes the shape of that path much clearer than any single annual figure can.

Reading the shape, not just the level

The FY21 contraction and FY22 rebound are largely a base-effect pair — a very low starting point mechanically produces a very high year-on-year growth number the following year, even without a proportionate improvement in underlying economic activity. This is a common distortion in any post-shock recovery and is one reason economists prefer to compare output levels against a pre-shock trend line, rather than reading year-on-year growth rates in isolation during the two or three years immediately following a major contraction.

What normalisation looks like from here

Once the base-effect distortion washes out of the data — typically two to three years after the initial shock — the more informative signal is whether growth settles into a stable band consistent with the economy's underlying trend rate, driven by its structural growth drivers: labour force growth, capital investment, and productivity gains. A growth rate that stabilises in a consistent band across several consecutive years, rather than swinging sharply from quarter to quarter, is generally read as a sign that the post-shock adjustment phase has genuinely completed.