Lashing out at the Narendra Modi government at the centre, Congress leader and former Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Friday said the country has the "most anti-intellectual" government in the world.

"We have the most anti-intellectual government in the world ~ which even thinks Dr Amartya Sen, a professor of Harvard University, is undeserving of any respect. It thinks that Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge are all useless,” Chidambaram said.

Amartya Sen termed the decision to ban high-denomination notes a ‘despotic action’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken a dig at economists critical of his demonetisation move, saying that “hard work is more powerful than Harvard.”

Chidambaram said demonetisation was done not on the recommendation of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to the Government of India. “Demonetisation is done on the diktat of Government of India to RBI,” he said.

Chidambaram said the Central Statistical Office (CSO) numbers claim that nothing has happened to the economy on account of demonetisation.

“The dazzle of this number cannot hide the fact that crores of people were devastated by this move. The government changed the methodology for calculating. They now have Gross Value Added (GVA). If one taxes and deducts subsidies, we arrive at GDP. Additional tax revenues are no reflection of growth,” he added.

Citing government data, he said going by the GVA figures it is clear that the economy has slowed down and the Q4 data of national income will further confirm that the economy has been hit "very very badly" by the note ban. The GVA numbers for the FY 2014-15 and FY 2015-16 does not show any trend, he said, adding that in FY 2016-17, there is a clear declining trend from the fourth quarter of FY 2015-16. The Net GVA shows that there is around 3 percentage point fall in the Net GVA of 8.76 since Q4 of FY 2015-16 to 5.73 of Q3 FY2016-17.    

Elaborating on the CSO growth calculation numbers, Chidambaram said  demonetisation did not affect three sectors. First, it did not affect government expenditure, on the contrary government spending increased after demonetisation. Second, it did not affect agricultural production since the monsoon was bountiful this year. However, it impacted the prices due to crash in commodity markets. And thirdly, it did not affect utilities such as paying of electricity bills. Moreover, government allowed use of old currency to pay utilities and people paid their long pending dues with old currency.

Chidambaram said that none of the government's motives of demonetisation such as eradication of black money, counterfeit currency and corruption has been met which made them change their narratives from time to time. "Every procedure and every norm was violated in taking this decision and announcing it,” he said.