The Longest Mandate: What 12 Years of Modiji Actually Built

Mahendra Rathod
Jun 12
13 min read

Indian tricolor flag waves over solar farm, highway and metro train with city skyline at sunset. — India's infrastructure and economic growth 2014 to 2026 — Modiji 12 years report card

I spent months looking at the actual numbers — not the headlines, not the debates. Here's what I found.

Before Modiji's 12 Years: The Long Road to Here

On the morning of May 26, 2014, a tea-seller's son from Vadnagar, Gujarat, was sworn in as the 14th Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy. Twelve years later, on June 10, 2026, that same man crossed 4,399 consecutive days in office — surpassing the elected tenure record set by Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who built modern India from scratch. Modiji's 12 years in office have just made him the longest-serving elected Prime Minister

Numbers alone don't tell you what those days built. So let's look at what actually happened.

Before 2014: The Long Road to Here

To understand what changed, you need to understand where India came from.

In August 1947, India was born into near-impossible circumstances. A nation of roughly 345 million people — freshly carved out of one of the bloodiest partitions in human history — with almost no manufacturing base, negligible foreign exchange reserves, no crude oil to sell, and an agricultural economy still recovering from centuries of colonial extraction. The leaders who inherited this country — Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Sardar Patel, Shastri, and later Indira Gandhi — were not starting a business. They were building a nation from rubble.

Nehru's socialism wasn't borrowed wholesale from the Soviet Union. His intellectual roots were in Fabian socialism — a British tradition he encountered at Cambridge — which believed in gradual, democratic transition to a welfare state. His 1927 visit to the USSR gave him the administrative template: Five Year Plans, state-owned enterprises, centralized planning. What emerged was a mix of three things: Gandhian ethics, socialist economics, and democratic politics. For a country with no institutional infrastructure, no capital markets, and most of its population illiterate, it was hard to see what else could have worked.

The License Raj that followed — for all its frustrations — had a logic to it. Economist Ha-Joon Chang makes this point well in 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism: South Korea protected its infant industries for decades before opening up to global competition. India did something similar. Just, perhaps, for a decade or two longer than needed.

By the late 1980s, the model had run its course. The foreign exchange crisis of 1991 forced the opening that should perhaps have come a decade earlier. Dr. Manmohan Singh — a man whose intellectual integrity and quiet dignity India lost in December 2024 — was the architect of that opening. His budget speech as Finance Minister, quoting Victor Hugo ("No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come"), remains one of the great moments in Indian economic history. The reforms of 1991 changed the trajectory of a nation. That is his permanent legacy, and it deserves to be stated without qualification.

By 2014, though, the UPA's second term had exhausted its mandate. Corruption scandals — 2G spectrum, Commonwealth Games, coal allocation — had badly damaged public trust. The Jan Lokpal agitation had channelled a generation's frustration into a single demand: accountability. People wanted change, and they wanted it decisively.

Enter Narendra Modi.

The Gujarat Laboratory (2001–2014)

I grew up in Gujarat. I was perhaps too young then to fully comprehend the scale of what was changing around me — but I could feel it. Consistent electricity. Better roads. A general sense that the state worked. What I didn't understand at the time was that Gujarat was being used as a laboratory.

Modiji became Chief Minister in October 2001, inheriting a state still recovering from the devastating Bhuj earthquake. What followed over 13 years was remarkable — not because Gujarat started from zero (it was already one of India's more industrialised states) but because of what was deliberately done with the foundation.

The Jyotigram Yojana gave villages 24x7 electricity — separating agricultural feeders from domestic supply so farmers got power on schedule and households got it uninterrupted. It became the blueprint for the national Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana in 2015. The Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors' Summit — launched in 2003 — turned a state government into a deal room, attracting Ford, Suzuki, and Tata with a business-friendly approach that cut red tape and delivered on promises. Gujarat's GSDP grew 9.8% annually between 2000 and 2010, compared to India's 7.7%. Nirmal Gujarat's sanitation push became Swachh Bharat. The BISAG geospatial infrastructure model became PM Gati Shakti. At least 23 state programmes were later scaled nationally.

The Gujarat years were not a myth. They were a working model. When Modiji arrived in Delhi in 2014, he didn't just bring a political mandate — he brought a playbook he had already tested.

The Economy: Numbers That Move Nations

Let's start with the headline.

When Modiji took office, India was the world's 10th largest economy. By 2025, it had become the 4th largest, with a GDP of $4.3 trillion — more than double the $2.1 trillion of 2015. In nominal rupee terms, GDP grew from ₹106 lakh crore in 2014–15 to ₹331 lakh crore in 2024–25: roughly a threefold increase in a decade.

The growth rate averaged 6% over the Modiji years — slightly below the 6.8% average under Manmohan Singh. But that comparison needs some context. The UPA years had the benefit of a global commodity boom. The NDA years absorbed demonetisation, the early chaos of GST, and a full year of COVID contraction — GDP shrank 5.8% in FY21, the worst in India's post-independence history. Take that one year out, and the picture looks quite different.

Exports doubled from $466 billion to $860 billion. FDI inflows doubled from $45 billion to $95 billion. The Sensex grew nearly threefold. Direct tax collections grew from roughly ₹7 lakh crore in 2014–15 to ₹25.87 lakh crore in 2024–25 — a near 4x increase. The number of income tax return filers grew from approximately 3.5 crore to over 9 crore. More Indians are in the formal economy than at any point in history.

The formalisation story is the one that doesn't get told enough. GST — for all the chaos of its early implementation — replaced a 17-layer tax structure with one unified national market. I felt this directly as a business owner: selling across state borders, which once meant dealing with different VAT regimes in every state, became manageable. It's not perfect. But it's so much better than what it replaced. Jan Dhan accounts brought 500 million previously unbanked Indians into the financial system. UPI processed 172 billion transactions in 2024 — nine times the volume of 2018. India now processes more digital payment transactions than the USA and Europe combined.

The smallest vegetable vendor in my neighbourhood in Bangalore accepts UPI. Think about that for a moment. That would have seemed absurd in 2014.

Building India: The Infrastructure Decade

If there is one area where the numbers speak for themselves, it is physical infrastructure. I'll just list what changed and let you draw your own conclusions.

National highways expanded from 91,287 km in 2013–14 to 1,46,566 km by March 2026 — a 60% increase. The construction pace went from 11.6 km per day to 34 km per day: nearly three times faster. Four-lane and above highways more than doubled from 18,278 km to 45,947 km. The country went from fewer than 100 km of expressways a decade ago to thousands of kilometres of access-controlled high-speed corridors.

Installed power capacity grew from 248 GW in 2014 to 532 GW by March 2026 — more than double. Power shortages fell from 4.2% to 0.03%. Average rural electricity availability increased from 12.5 hours per day to 22.6 hours. Train accidents fell from 135 in 2014–15 to just 16 in 2025–26. Metro rail expanded from 248 km operational in 2014 to over 1,013 km by 2025.

Perhaps the most quietly transformative number: rural tap water coverage went from 17% of households in 2019 to nearly 82% by 2026 under the Jal Jeevan Mission. Infrastructure spending has risen sixfold since 2014 to $128.56 billion annually.

These aren't showpiece projects. Roads get farmers to markets. Power keeps factories running. Clean water keeps children alive. The difference these things make is enormous — and you only notice how much when they're missing.

The Human Story: Poverty, Health, and Welfare

The poverty numbers, depending on which methodology you use, range from impressive to extraordinary. The most conservative reliable estimate — from the National Council of Applied Economic Research — shows poverty declining from 21.2% in 2011–12 to 8.5% in 2022–24. The World Bank's own data shows extreme poverty (under $2.15 per day) falling from 16.2% to 2.3% over roughly the same period, lifting approximately 171 million people. Both Congress and BJP have claimed credit for this — the truth is that poverty reduction accelerated under conditions built over multiple governments, but the direct benefit transfer architecture, the cooking gas connections under Ujjwala Yojana (over 100 million households), and the free foodgrain programme reaching 81 crore Indians during and after COVID all belong to this decade.

On health indicators, the story is consistent and well-documented. Infant mortality fell from 39 per 1,000 live births in 2014 to approximately 25 by 2025. Under-5 mortality fell from 45 to 32. India's maternal mortality reduction over 33 years — 86% — outpaces the global average of 48% by nearly double.

The Global Hunger Index ranks India 105th in 2024, which sounds alarming until you examine the methodology. India's actual hunger score improved from 35.2 to 27.3 over the same period. The ranking fell because other countries improved faster — but India's absolute condition got better. More importantly, researchers have noted that the GHI's benchmarks for child stunting and wasting use international norms that may not account for India's genetic diversity and differing metabolic profiles. It is a legitimate scientific debate, not just a political one. The government providing free food to 81 crore people — more than the population of the United States and Europe combined — doesn't feature in that index at all.

The Digital Revolution: India's Unexpected Superpower

Of everything in this post, the digital story is the one that surprises me most when I look at the actual numbers.

In 2014, 48.3% of Indians had a bank account. By 2024, that was 71.1%. The way it happened was through Aadhaar — 1.4 billion people enrolled — linked to Jan Dhan accounts and mobile numbers. Direct Benefit Transfers through this system have saved an estimated ₹3.48 lakh crore in leakages that used to disappear into middlemen and ghost beneficiaries. That money now reaches actual people.

Then there is UPI. Launched in 2016, Unified Payments Interface processed 172 billion transactions in 2024 — a ninefold increase from 2018. India now processes more digital transactions than the USA and Europe combined. Average monthly mobile data usage per subscriber went from 62 MB in 2014 to 25 GB by mid-2025. 5G is now live in 99.9% of India's districts.

I'll be honest: I had already moved my transactions online years before demonetisation, so when the note ban came in November 2016 I barely felt it personally. But I watched what happened around me — the queues, the frustration, the very real pain of ordinary people who ran on cash and suddenly had none. And I also watched what happened after: UPI took off. The street vendor who had no bank history suddenly had a transaction record. The kirana owner who had never filed taxes suddenly had a digital trail. A policy that caused real disruption ended up pushing the whole country towards digital payments faster than anything else could have.

The UPI curve is the demonetisation legacy that nobody talks about. It should be the headline.

And then, in August 2023, India landed Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon's south pole — something no other country had managed. ISRO did it on a fraction of NASA's budget. That doesn't happen by accident. It's the result of decades of steady investment in scientific talent and institutions.

Demonetisation: The Disruptive Bet

On November 8, 2016, 86% of India's currency was cancelled overnight. Whatever you think of the decision, nobody can call it timid.

The main argument for demonetisation — that it would destroy black money held in cash — didn't hold up. 99% of the notes came back. What went wrong was a fundamental misunderstanding of how black money actually works in India. Wealthy people with unaccounted wealth don't keep it in cash under their mattresses. They park it in gold, property, and overseas accounts. The ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes in circulation were mostly the working capital of ordinary people running ordinary lives — grocery money, daily wages, small business float. Of course it came back. It had to.

What the 99% return actually showed was that India's cash economy was largely legitimate — not criminal, just informal. The government had conflated the two.

That said, there were real disruptions to networks that used cash to fund anti-social activities, and the new currency's security features did set back counterfeiting operations. Whether there was specific intelligence that made November 2016 the right moment — that may become clearer with time. Classified decisions don't come with explanations attached.

The genuine wins showed up elsewhere. Tax return filings jumped 25% in one year. Operation Clean Money flagged 18 lakh suspicious deposit cases. Direct tax collections grew in double digits for years after. And UPI — as I mentioned — went from a promising pilot to the backbone of India's economy in the years that followed.

Did demonetisation achieve what it set out to do? Mostly no. Did it accidentally achieve things nobody planned for? Actually, yes.

India in the World: The Multi-Alignment Decade

In 2014, India was a large country with regional influence. In 2026, it's a different story.

What changed is best described by Foreign Minister Jaishankar's phrase: "multi-alignment." Not non-alignment — that was Nehru's position, staying out of everyone's way. Multi-alignment is more active: build real relationships with multiple powers simultaneously and use them all. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, India bought Russian crude oil at a discount, kept its defence partnership with Moscow intact, deepened its strategic partnership with Washington, and lost nothing from either. That's not fence-sitting. That's just good diplomacy.

The G20 Presidency in 2023 was India's most visible moment on the world stage. Getting the New Delhi Declaration agreed — with Russia and the West both at the table — was genuinely difficult, and India pulled it off. Getting the African Union admitted as a full G20 member was something that had been talked about for years and never happened until India made it happen. Through the Voice of Global South Summits, India gave 125 developing nations a platform and a voice they hadn't had before.

The military picture has also changed. The Uri surgical strike, the Balakot air strike, and Operation Sindoor sent a clear message: India will respond to cross-border threats, and there will be consequences. Whether you agree with every decision, the overall shift in how India is perceived — and how it perceives itself — is real.

India hosted the G20, landed on the Moon, became the world's most populous country, and overtook the UK and Germany to become the 4th largest economy — all in one decade. The world noticed.

The COVID Test

No honest account of these 12 years can skip the pandemic.

COVID-19 was the biggest crisis any Indian government had faced in decades. The first lockdown — announced with four hours' notice on March 24, 2020 — was one of the strictest anywhere in the world. The handling of migrant workers in those early weeks was painful to watch: millions of people walking hundreds of kilometres home because buses had stopped and nobody had a plan for them. That's a fair criticism and I won't dress it up.

But the vaccination programme that came after was genuinely impressive. Over 2.2 billion doses for a population of 1.4 billion — the largest vaccination drive in history by volume. Free for everyone. Delivered using the same digital infrastructure — Aadhaar, CoWIN — that the government had been quietly building for other reasons. India made its own vaccines through Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute, and once the second wave passed, started exporting them to poorer countries.

I was lucky — steady work, work from home, no real disruption personally. A lot of Indians weren't. But looking at how countries far richer than India handled COVID, and how many of them managed it worse, there's something there worth acknowledging.

The Honest Reckoning: What Still Needs Work

No 12-year record is without gaps. Here are the ones worth naming.

Jobs — the economy grew, but formal employment didn't keep pace. A lot of the growth came from sectors that need capital more than people. India has 1.4 billion people, a huge number of them young. The Production Linked Incentive schemes, the manufacturing push, the infrastructure spending — these are the right moves. The pace just needs to be faster.

Real wages — nominal wages went up, but so did inflation. For agricultural workers and the urban informal sector, real purchasing power grew at roughly 1% a year through 2014–2024. With inflation now down to 3.4%, the conditions for that to change are finally in place. But it needs to actually happen.

Inequality — the gap at the top has grown. The top 1% now holds about 22.6% of national income. That's a pattern you see in most fast-growing economies, but it doesn't make it less of a challenge. Broadening the benefits of growth is the work of the years ahead.

India grew fast. These are the typical tensions that come with growing fast. I don't think they undermine the overall direction — but they need honest attention, not just optimism.

So What Does This Mean?

I started 2014 as an early-career professional in Bangalore, reading the news without really digging into it. I was a genuine admirer of Dr Manmohan Singh — his intellectual depth, his role in 1991, the quiet dignity he brought to public life. I still am. He gave India something that compounded for decades.

But I spent several months actually going through the numbers for this post. Not the debates. Not the op-eds. The actual data.

What I found is not a perfect record — governing 1.4 billion people for 12 years could never produce one. But what I found is a country that is genuinely, measurably better positioned in 2026 than it was in 2014. The roads are better. Power is more reliable. More people have bank accounts. The tax system, while still imperfect, is simpler. The startup I run today would have been much harder to run in 2014 — not because I'm better at it, but because the environment underneath it has improved. UPI means getting paid takes seconds. GST means I'm not managing a different tax consultant in every state. Digital banking means basic transactions don't require a trip to a branch and a pile of forms. My brothers run businesses today in an environment that didn't really exist ten years ago.

India went from 10th to 4th in the world. 170 million people climbed out of extreme poverty. A tea-seller's son from Vadnagar became the longest-serving elected Prime Minister in the country's history — because three separate elections said: keep going.

The record itself isn't the point. What got built during those days is.

Happy Reading!