PrintFriendlyPrime Minister Modi assumed the reins of power in mid-2014 and set the tone for his administration well within the first 100 days. The effect of the policy changes started to take effect by 2015. Thus, 2015 to 2025 represents the actual full decade of India under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership.
Let us take a birds-eye view of the socio-economic achievements of this past decade. We shall also put in perspective how these changes have completely transformed the way we think about economic growth and development. Prime Minister Modi brought human dignity, quality of life and the rights of the citizen-critical priorities for any true democracy, to the centre of the development debate. We shall also focus on how Prime Minister Modi challenged our understanding of what is possible-the scale of ambition of and the pace of development at which outcomes could be achieved.
Readers, these are not trivial issues. By redefining the scope of development related policies Prime Minister Modi eliminated a whole network of vested interests and patronage politics that played an important role in the divide (using caste, region and religion) and rule politics of the past. His ability to push through mega-schemes and drive implementation exposed the inefficiency and corruption in our older models of governance. By achieving development outcomes in just ten years that were greater than the sum of what had been achieved over five or six decades combined, he underlined the indifference of India’s old elite to the needs of the average Indian. Prime Minister Modis’ legacy of this last decade is therefore not just the stellar development outcomes, but his shattering of myths and exposing the dishonesty and venality of the elites that governed India for much of its post-Independence years.
Economic Growth
Let us start with the most obvious number, GDP. As per the latest data released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) India’s GDP increased from 2.4 trillion USD in 2015 to USD 4.3 trillion USD in 2025, after adjusting for inflation, i.e., in real terms. This represents a growth of 77% over this period. This is higher than any other G20 economy. Second is China with 74%, and Turkiye a distant third at 59%.
It is also interesting to note that India grew by more than double the world average of 35%. India contributed roughly USD 2 trillion to the overall global GDP expansion of USD 30 trillion, or roughly 6.7% of the global economic expansion. India’s share of world GDP increased from a mere 2.1% in 2015 to 4.3%. This needs to be put perspective of the fact that India’s share of world GDP in 1950 at the time of independence, coming out of years of colonial exploitation was around 3%, still higher than our share in 2015.
India has paid a terrible price for a top-down government controlled economic model which thrived on cronyism and political patronage in the first decades of independence. The post 1991 reforms had incrementally changed the system, but the sins of the past left India relatively less dynamic and competitive than its competitors. The last decade saw a reversal of that trend.
An increase in share mathematically signifies doing better than average. The fact that India doubled its share of global GDP in just a decade signifies substantively outperforming the world and its developing country peers. But we need to also consider the fact that these were not easy years. There were headwinds to global economic growth starting 2018. The world went through the shock of a unprecedented global pandemic that resulted in massive economic disruption in the years 2020-2022.
Eliminating Poverty
A persistent narrative pushed by Leftist intellectuals is that GDP growth during the NDA 2 years has not led to benefits for India’s poor. Nothing can be further than the truth. Share of people living in extreme poverty (defined as % of population living on less than USD 2.15 per day) fell from around 10% of the population to less than 1%. Essentially, India has eliminated extreme poverty under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership. Even the Economist magazine, not the Indian governments biggest fan, acknowledges this massive achievement in their March 1-7th 2025 edition.
Even more impressively, higher poverty, i.e., being poor but not indigent, defined as % of population living on less than USD 3.2[1] per day declined from about 50% to just 15% of India’s population.
Let us put things in historical context here. In mid 1990s, half of India’s population lived in extreme poverty. In the first 50 years of India’s independence, 45 years of which was under Congress rule, India ended up with more people in extreme poverty (about 480 million) than the total population of India at the time of independence in 1947 (about 360 million).
In the next 28 years, 17 of which was under BJP led NDA governments, India eliminated extreme poverty and reduced the number of Indian brothers and sisters living in higher order poverty from close to two-third of our population to less than one-sixth.
Widening the Middle-Class
Another common lamentation is that the middle-class has been suffering under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership since 2014. This is another narrative building exercise that crumbles in the face of facts. Let us consider the measure of percentage of population living on more than USD 6.15 per day, a parameter of middle-class status. Only 10.5% of India’s population or just 138 million people qualified for such a status in 2015. By 2025, in just ten years, that number has more than doubled to 23% of India’s population, based on estimates using World Bank data.
Which means India has roughly 335 million people in the middle-class today. Prime Minister Modi’s policies added close to 200 million people in India’s middle-class. That is roughly the population of Brazil. Readers, please take note. The population of Brazil, the world’s seventh most populous country is 212 million. Prime Minister Modi took the equivalent of the entire population of Brazil, from poverty to middle-class status in just ten years.
Creating the world’s largest social safety net
If one reads western social scientists and their pedantic Indian counterparts one would start to imagine that the concept of social safety nets and state led welfare were inventions of the west. Any serious reader of Indian history will be able to challenge that notion. But the record of the modern Indian state in being able to deliver welfare to a vast majority of its citizens have been relatively poor. Plagued by poorly designed models, ineffective delivery due to bureaucratic mismanagement and in several instances rampant corruption ensured that very little of the allocated funds reached the intended beneficiaries. Thus the (in)famous quote by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on how just 15 paise of every Rupee spend on a scheme reaches the citizen.
But if leakage was a problem, so was the scale and ambition of our welfare schemes. It did too little for too few of our citizens who deserved better. It took the determined leadership of Prime Minister Modi to break this status-quo. The first step was the now globally celebrated Jan Dhan/Aadhar/Mobile trinity or JAM.
Prior to the launch of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) around 40% of Indian adults had a bank account and less than 20% had a debit card. By 2017 almost every household in India had access to a Bank account, as did 80% of India’s adult citizens. Today more than 90% of adults and all Indian families have access to a Bank account. With these accounts being linked to unique citizenship ID (Aadhar) and mobile numbers, it created the building blocks of the greatest initiative in social welfare delivery in human history-India’s Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) program.
Consider the facts. In 2013-14 a paltry 5k crores was distributed through DBT to less than 10 million beneficiaries[2]. By 2025, DBT was averaging around 250k crore in cash received by over 700 million beneficiaries and 350k crore in kind transfer with over 1100 million beneficiaries. The number of beneficiaries exceeds the combined population of US, Canada, European Union and Japan, all of the ‘western’ economies.
Reader, I draw your attention to the scale of achievement. Over 90% of Indian citizens get direct benefits from multiple schemes of the Government of India. Total transfers exceed 600k crores. If one assumes that there are 27[3] crore Indian families who are beneficiaries of DBT, then per capita welfare transfer would be around 22 thousand Rupees per family, per year. All of it without leakage. Even more importantly, without the loss of dignity of our Indian brothers and sisters who had to often cajole, beg, and even pay bribes to get the government benefits that is their right as citizens. This is the philosophy on ‘Antodaya’ in action, not words.
The DBT scheme played a critical role in ensuring the elimination of extreme poverty and reduction in poverty overall. But there was also the need to ensure that sudden life and livelihood shocks do not push families back into poverty. The biggest single reason for many Indian families who break out of poverty to be pushed back is health related emergencies. High out of pocket expenses for healthcare presents a major expenditure shock, requiring low-income families to borrow money, or use up their hard-earned savings. Reduced capital and need to service loans results in families being forced to cut down on quality nutrition, education for the next generation, and overall quality of life.
Prime Minister Modi took the existing Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana that suffered from a number of institutional flaws and integrated it into the Ayushman Bharat Scheme that was designed to achieve the vision for Universal Health Coverage for all Indians. The resultant Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana or PM-JAY is the world’s largest health assurance scheme. It covers over 600 million citizens which is more than the combined population of all the G7 member states.
It is just not the sheer number. The strength of the program lies in details. Learning from past experience, the scheme is designed to ensure that every aspect of healthcare for which India’s low-income families were harassed or had to make out of pocket expenses have been covered. The program covers pre-hospitalization and post hospitalization expenses that could cost even more than what was spend in hospital fees, to all costs related to drugs, diagnostic services, physician’s fees, room charges, surgeon charges, OT and ICU charges. The program is comprehensive including 1929 different types of procedures within its ambit. And the program is truly national-a citizen can visit any empanelled public or private hospital in India to avail cashless treatment.
PM-JAY is the result of a vision of man who comes from the grassroots and has felt the pain of the people, not technocrats and experts who have ideated in air-conditioned seminar rooms. It also represents the ideological moorings of a political establishment that believes in a deep rooted Indian civilizational view of equity and welfare- that of antodaya, not borrowed western concepts of socialism and Marxism.
Human Dignity
Consider the fact that even after almost seven decades of independence, close to half of Indians did not have access to toilets. Most of those so deprived were in India’s rural areas. Those who ruled India from Delhi for most of these seven decades probably considered toilets to be a luxury for the poor, not a basic fundamental right of human dignity.
Prime Minister Modi made this issue one of his priorities. In 2015 just about 40% of rural Indian households had access to toilets. By 2025 95% of rural households had access to toilets and 100% of Indian villages have been made open defecation free. The daily humiliation of so many of our mothers and sisters has finally come to an end, their dignity restored. Again reader ask yourself why this simple and basic need was not addressed for so many decades after independence. Why do those political parties who speak in the name of the oppressed and the poor and claim socialism as their political creed could not do this in decade after decade they governed from the centre and states?
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I was exposed to many arthouse films that directly or indirectly touched upon the theme of access to water in India’s rural areas. Our fellow citizens in rural areas, mostly women, devoted hours of their lives getting access to this most fundamental of human needs-water. I often wondered how difficult it would be to connect our villages with piped water from the nearest source.
Since only 13% or so of our rural households had access to piped water connections in 2014, my brainwashed mind accepted that this must be very complicated indeed. One of those perennial problems of development. So, I must admit I was sceptical when Prime Minister Modi announced that he will provide piped water to 100% of Indian rural households within a very short time. In 2025, 80% of all rural households already have access to piped water.
I realized that while Leftist filmmakers and their political gurus were busy waxing eloquent on the rural-urban divide, Prime Minister Modi, inspired as he was by his own rural upbringing, had not just thought of a solution, but implemented it. This was one instance, where I felt ashamed of my middle-class blinkered urban upbringing and the scepticism it brought about. It was an abject lesson in the power of ambition and perseverance.
By freeing up hours and hours of drudgery spend in getting water, Prime Minister Modi did more for the upliftment and empowerment of women then all the seminars organized on this topic in Delhi’s elite seminar halls in the last seven decades. Adjusting for purchasing power parity, it might have even cost less than the combined expenditure on such seminars and their associated programs.
Reader, I can go on. From initiatives in public transport to ease of doing business. From protecting the health of our mothers and sisters from toxic fumes of coal and wood based fires by giving them access to cooking gas to massive strides in logistics infrastructure. That would make this a massive article as there is so much to talk about. Instead, I shall end with a simple insight from Indic civilizational ethos on economic development that has driven Prime Minister Modi’s policies, and which even the Economist has admitted to, though not in so many words.
The Economics of the Family and Community
The Economist admits that this substantial decline in absolute poverty, and poverty in general has come as a surprise to many mainstream economists. Lifting large agrarian societies out of poverty has typically been ascribed to the growth of a large manufacturing sector that absorbed surplus labour from agriculture creating new economic opportunities and helping reduce poverty.
India has not followed this trajectory in toto. While there has been an absolute increase in manufacturing jobs, it is nowhere near the levels of China or Southeast Asia. The economic mobility story is explained by the Economist through an example of inter-generational rise in economic status of one family. In their example, the first-generation landless farmer moved to the city and worked odd jobs to earn extra money that helped his son finish high school. His son got a job working in a school. He in turn has now managed to send his son, the third generation to university.
This commitment to improving the lives of one’s next generation, of investing in the family’s long-term growth is the essential human force of development. It functions through entrepreneurial abilities, hard work and merit, and the ability to make sacrifices in the present for longer-term improvement. These forces are well-known and understood within every Indian family and community. But it remains a relatively poorly studied phenomenon in formal development economies.
Even when ‘western’ academics look at these issues they lose the wood for the trees by focusing on inequities in inter-generational mobility due to class and caste. I had referred to this power of inter-generational wealth creation and its exponential impact on development in an earlier article[4]. I am glad that the Economist magazine has also come to understand the power of this simple idea rooted in civilizational values that India shares with many other traditional societies.
Prime Minister Modi understands the power of this idea well. So, his focus has been to remove the shackles and impediments that keep families from investing in their longer-term economic development. After all our nation is the sum of its families and its communities.
Each and every one of PM Modi’s programs are aimed at reducing the shocks that come in the way of accumulation of financial and human capital and its transfer from one generation to the next. Access to piped water and toilets significantly reduce the probability of disease and health emergencies that destabilize family savings. But even when such emergencies occur, universal health assurance minimizes the economic shock.
Direct benefit transfer ensures that families in the bottom of the pyramid are safeguarded to the extent possible from economic cycles or exigencies due to natural or man-made disasters. DBT transfers augments economic abilities of those in the bottom of the pyramid. This in turn frees up crucial financial resources that can be invested in human capital or finance for starting small enterprises or investment in value-addition in agriculture, all of which add to incremental increase in incomes.
All of the investments in infrastructure and ease of doing business reduce operational costs of entrepreneurial activities, especially small businesses. A successful national skill development exercise creates employment opportunities. An industrial housing program allows increased savings by factory workers that they can send back to their families. I shall write more on some of these aspects in a following article. Prime Minister Modi is planting the seeds of an economic revolution. His own life journey has perhaps underlined his deep understanding that all that the government must do is to facilitate the ability of the common Indian family to aspire and work unhindered, and with dignity to achieve that aspiration.
[1] Converted for purchasing power parity
[2] Beneficiary count is non-unique
[3] India has about 30 crore families in total. If one assumes that the top 10% do not receive (or are marginal recipients) of DBT related schemes, we get the broad number of 27 crore
[4] Seeing without Looking: ‘Eminent’ Economists and their (Myopic) Understanding of Indian Economy’s Colossal Transformation in PM Modi’s Era, 26 December 2023, available at https://spmrf.org/seeing-without-looking-eminent-economists-and-their-myopic-understanding-of-indian-economys-colossal-transformation-in-pm-modis-era/
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(The views expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the organisation)