(Bloomberg) India’s commerce ministry said it overstated merchandise exports by $9 billion in the eight months through November because of “misclassification and errors” in computing overseas sales.

“Notwithstanding the misclassification, there were errors in double counting and all sorts of things which inflated exports by about $9 billion,” Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar told reporters in New Delhi yesterday. Overseas sales in the April-to-November period now stands at $192.7 billion, Khullar said.

India’s monthly export growth has averaged about 44 percent since April even as Europe’s debt crisis and a faltering U.S. recovery reduced global consumer demand, prompting economists to question the quality of the data. Today’s revision explains “in part the weakening of the rupee,” Asia’s worst-performing currency this year, said Jay Shankar, Mumbai-based economist at Religare Capital Markets Ltd.

“The global economy isn’t doing well, so it was hard to understand how India was posting such fantastic export numbers,” said Biswajit Dhar, director of New Delhi-based Research and Information System for Developing Countries. “There were reasons to believe something was going wrong.” .............(more)

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