Anamitra Saha and Madhura Swaminathan in their article published in Economic and Political Weekly in 1994 using the Government of West Bengal's index of total output, showed that the exponential growth rate for all West Bengal for the period 1981-82 to 1990-91 was an impressive 6.5 percent per annum compared to 2.27 percent during 1965-80 estimated by James Boyce. The district wise pattern of growth in production suggests that with the exception of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri, the index of aggregate crop production grew by over 5 percent annually in all districts of West Bengal. The districts with very high growth rate in Saha and Swaminathan's estimates are Bankura (9.5 percent), Birbhum (9.3 percent), Midnapur (8.5 percent) and Purulia (8.4 percent).

S. Datta Ray (1994a), the former Director of the Bureau of Applied Economics and Statistics (BAES) raised some objections against the findings of Saha and Swaminathan. According to him new sample design was introduced since mid eighties that lacks the authenticity of data. According to him the so-called high growth is owing to the spurious statistical data.

At a workshop on `Agricultural Growth and Agrarian Structure in Contemporary West Bengal and Bangladesh' held in Calcutta on January, 1995, James Boyce speculated that the true rate of agricultural growth in West Bengal in the 1980s may have been around 4 percent per year. While not as spectacular as the rates estimated from the official data, this would still represent an impressive performance far surpassing prior growth rates in the state and comparing quite favourably with agricultural growth elsewhere in India. The fact that this growth occurred during a period of modest but significant agrarian reforms is noteworthy, suggesting that greater equity is compatible with efficiency and growth.

In the same workshop Biplab Dasgupta argued that if the bias in yield reports had been constant over the 1980s, the rate of growth, which was the main focus of dispute, would have remained unchanged. Whatever the actual rate of growth in agricultural production in West Bengal, the Left Front government has gained credit from the very high levels implied by official data.

Abhijit Sen and Ranja Sengupta (1995) in the paper entitled `The Recent Growth in Agricultural Output in Eastern India, with special reference to the case of West Bengal' presented to the same seminar, used an alternative source of data side by side with West Bengal's official agricultural statistics. The alternative data was collected by the surveys conducted for the Comprehensive Cost of Production Studies by the Central Government's Ministry of Agriculture. When the data from this alternative source is plotted against the official data of West Bengal, it comes close to the official ones. Particularly for the later years the two give almost identical figures. Where the two data sets do differ, the Cost of Production estimates show much larger yields than the official data in 1981-82, 1983-84, and 1984-85, ie. before the changes leading to deterioration in the quality of agricultural statistics brought about by arbitrary administrative decisions.