The Modi era can certainly be read as a catalogue of schemes or infrastructural projects. But it is better seen as a continuous attempt to extend the boundaries of what is possible by developing a series of state capacities that remove the constraints on individual agency and action.
This month marks 25 years of Narendra Modi as head of government—from Chief Minister to Prime Minister. Few Indian leaders have had the opportunity to test their governance philosophy across two levels of the system for so long. While the durability of his political career is discussed often, the durability of his governing ideas do not get much attention. In January 2012, writing on Narendra Modi’s Panchamrut governance model in The Sunday Guardian, I argued that the real significance of the model lay far beyond Gujarat’s growth rate or infrastructure developments. For those who are not aware, the model is the confluence of the mutually reinforcing five shaktis of knowledge, water, energy, security and people.
I focused on its second-order consequences, the altered state-citizen relationship and citizen mindset. As I noted at the time: “This change is more at a behavioural level than at physical, and hence not written about much.” Fourteen years, dozens of books, and hundreds of articles on Modi later, it remains an underdeveloped lens, though it has been a recurring subject of my writing in this publication. Conventional commentary measures state activities and their failures, focuses on the leader’s charisma, or lists statistics and successful schemes. The true long-term benchmark of governance is neither the scheme nor the state; it is the operating relationship between the citizen, the state, and opportunity.
THE FOUNDATION
The Panchamrut model had a deceptively simple but foundational insight: development cannot happen through silos. The Gujarat experience showed that the value of state capacity compounds when its different components begin to work together. After 2014, when the model scaled to the national level, the objective has been to create mutually reinforcing capabilities. Accordingly, the state has done more than provide public goods; it has been setting up the conditions under which both citizens and businesses can produce social and economic value.
The Modi government has shown that it is possible to build an environment in which social capital can be strengthened and world-class outcomes achieved. The cost of moving people, goods, money, information and ideas has been reduced, which in turn has allowed individuals and enterprises to connect with new markets, skills and opportunities. More importantly, the focus has remained on jan shakti, crucial for the demographic dividend. The Modi era can certainly be read as a catalogue of schemes or infrastructural projects. But it is better seen as a continuous attempt to extend the boundaries of what is possible by developing a series of state capacities that remove the constraints on individual agency and action.
THE MECHANISMS
Historically, the Indian state functioned as a negotiated entity, exacerbating both survival and participation frictions. This changed substantially under the Modi government, particularly through the expansion of digital and direct-delivery systems. Citizen-State Debrokering: One of the most significant structural shifts witnessed during the last decade is debrokering. Direct benefit transfers, Digital India and standardised protocols have facilitated a direct connection between citizens and the state. This has played a big role in dismantling the prevalent mai-baap culture.
There is an overall positive change in how citizens experience the state. For the citizens, particularly the poor, interaction with the state has moved from distant and deferential to direct and dignified. Reduction of Survival Frictions: The real value of near-universal basic public goods is in the removal of daily frictions like fetching water or cooking fuel, lack of electricity, travelling long distances for schools or jobs, or the economic cost of illnesses. When survival becomes less consuming, a household gets to think beyond the next necessity. The Modi era has expanded choices for crores of people by removing obstacles that survival struggles place in the way of aspiration and opportunity. The Opportunity Landscape: The Modi government has not merely made people better able to navigate the old economy; it has also expanded the range of opportunities they can navigate towards. It has done so through interventions in education, skill development and economic activity.
While quality remains a concern, educational infrastructure has received a massive boost. Mudra, Startup India, formalisation, digital commerce, expanded financial services and the opening of new sectors have created additional avenues for economic participation and enterprise. The result is both a wider opportunity set and lower barriers to reaching it. Reduction of Participation Frictions: The Modi era has focused on inclusion— geographically, financially, digitally and socio-economically. The thresholds have become less daunting, and the overall environment more enabling. The result is a lower cost of attempting, transacting and scaling. Crucially, this weakens the extent to which opportunity is determined by inherited advantage. A young citizen’s options are less strictly determined by geography, family connections or economic class. These mechanisms do not operate in isolation. De-brokering makes the state more accessible; reduced survival frictions free households from immediate necessity; a wider opportunity landscape gives them options; and lower participation frictions widen the circle of those able to enter.
THE SECOND-ORDER IMPACT
Possibility Frontier: The role of governance is to reduce the conditions that hold human aspiration and brilliance back. As constraints diminish and avenues multiply, the feasible option set broadens. People acquire greater agency and room to act. The question is no longer what the state provides, but what an ordinary Indian can realistically pursue. This is how a country can move towards the Viksit Bharat goal: not because the state creates every breakthrough, but because vastly more citizens can attempt things that were previously beyond their possibility frontier. They increasingly view themselves as participants in the India growth story. The consequential question is what happens when crores of citizens have a larger feasible option set. Mindset Transformation: When the state becomes more accessible and responsive, when it demonstrates that citizens’ lives have value through the way it protects and serves them, when it caters to their basic needs and creates a conducive environment to thrive, it gradually alters citizen expectations, confidence and ambition.
The psychological ceiling begins to move—from hesitation in approaching the state and difficulty in accessing it to dignified transactions with the state and expectations of greater performance from it. The legacy state often romanticised poverty, while normalising poor public provision and bureaucratic delay. The expansion of visibly higher-quality public infrastructure in the Modi era, among other things, has helped weaken the thirdworld inferiority complex. Healing the rupture between the contemporary political state and its civilisational roots supplied the moral capital necessary for decolonisation of the mind as a state cannot build a twentyfirst-century economy with a population burdened by a subservient mindset.
THE BASELINE
The deepest test for a government is not whether it solves the problems that brought it to power. It is whether, having solved them, it changes what citizens regard as acceptable thereafter. A tap, reliable electricity, digital payments, direct transfers— what was once a promise or a breakthrough has quickly become a baseline. Having seen consistent delivery in one domain, citizens expect the same in another. Having encountered a discretion-free system, they are less tolerant of discretion-dependent ones. Governance becomes selfreinforcing, because each achieved capability raises the standard by which the next is measured. What was once exceptional becomes expected; what was once tolerated is increasingly difficult to accept. The significance of this shift is that it is difficult to reverse. In a mai-baap system, a citizen owes gratitude to the politician who secures a water connection, a road or a benefit.
But when delivery becomes universal, automated and increasingly discretion-free, it becomes a civic default. It weakens the traditional currency of political gratitude. Citizens do not remain grateful for yesterday’s delivery; they reset their baseline and demand the next improvement. It is to the Narendra Modi government’s credit that it has shifted the baseline and raised the expectations of citizens. It is therefore important to flag contradictions. India has built an increasingly impersonal state that runs on protocols, platforms and code, while politics continues to be highly personalised. A system designed around Nagrik Devo Bhava therefore sits uneasily beside a political culture that elevates the leader to a dev-like stature instead of his preferred Pradhan Sewak role, undermining the very equation of the governed and the governing that he has worked hard to change. Also, his 25-yearlong effort towards empowerment and away from the muftkhor mindset should not be impacted by the political culture of freebies. These should be curtailed if the governance model and its benchmarks are to outlast the leader who advanced it.
INDIA @2047
Viksit Bharat 2047 gives India a concrete goal. Citizens can measure their lived reality against the country’s stated trajectory and demand the next level of institutional performance. In that sense, 2047 becomes a self-audit for the government itself. The question is no longer whether the state can expand capabilities, but whether the political system can sustain the institutional discipline and social trust required to convert those capabilities into a developed India. India’s development will ultimately depend on what its citizens are able to do with the possibility frontier, and on whether they can cooperate across the identities that divide them. India cannot convert greater state capacity and greater individual opportunity into a demographic dividend if the demography is divided across religious, caste or regional identities.
Physical and digital infrastructure can make distance irrelevant, but it cannot bring people closer. An Indian may have greater access to finance, technology, education and markets than before, but the opportunity created by those capabilities can still be constrained by social distrust, exclusion, and fragmentation. This is why social trust is not a peripheral or sentimental concern for Viksit Bharat. It is central to converting opportunity into shared prosperity. A developed India will require not only capable individuals and capable institutions, but citizens who see one another as fellow participants in a common national project. The next challenge of governance is therefore not merely to meet the expectations of Indians, but to build the social trust crucial for shared national progress.
