When the Union Budget was presented in February, a popular notion was that the Indian economy was witnessing a “rare goldilocks period”, as RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra put it. A cultural reference, goldilocks refers to an economy being exactly where policymakers would like it to be — sustained growth, low inflation, and low unemployment.

Since then, the news has turned negative.

First, India revised (with a new base year of 2022-23) how it calculates its gross domestic product (GDP) — the measure used to assess the size of any economy — and found that the old series (with 2011-12 as base year) was overestimating GDP.

Then came the US’s war in Iran, and the further fall in the rupee’s exchange rate with the US dollar.…