Goodwill Winning

For the past decade, most analysts have struggled to decode the inner workings of the three-term Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. Unlike its predecessors, this
administration has maintained remarkable opacity, revealing little. Information is disseminated strictly on a need-to-know basis.

However, in the run-up to the General Election last year, we got an insider view, when Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman offered a rare glimpse into the government’s operating system. Delivering the keynote at the launch of the book The Art of Implementation: How Modi ki Guarantee is Delivered, Sitharaman, who has been at the centre of policymaking during crises like the pandemic and the subsequent economic recovery, shared the guiding principles of what is increasingly referred to as Modinomics.

What she revealed was not a grand ideology, nor an elaborate playbook of reforms. Instead, it was strikingly simple. Governance is relentless execution, rooted in clarity of priorities.

Governance Mantra

The pillars of Modinomics, as distilled from Sitharaman’s
remarks, can be summarised as follows:

– Complete long-pending infrastructure projects, regardless of when or by whom they were announced;

– Ensure saturation coverage of basic amenities—electricity, banking, toilets, cooking gas—in the remotest corners of the country;

– Conduct monthly reviews of aspirational districts via direct engagement with district collectors;

-Track progress of flagship schemes like Swachh Bharat Mission and evaluate their broader social gains;

-Prioritise capital expenditure to build physical assets that drive long-term growth.

This is not rocket science. In fact, it is precisely the opposite: a deliberate embrace of simplicity. 

The principle evokes the design philosophy of KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid—which argues that the most efficient systems are those that resist unnecessary complexity. 

In governance, this translates to cutting through bureaucratic inertia and focusing on the basics.The thing is that NDA has worked with the very same tools and babu raj that failed previous regimes. Ironically, this was the very broken system that ensured every development goal eluded India. The big difference is that NDA retooled processes to bring in unprecedented transparency and accountability.

Whether it be Aadhaar, direct benefits transfers (DBTs), toilets, cooking gas, all of them are schemes that existed in the past. Unfortunately, due to the lack of political will and administrative weakness, these remained broken promises.

Simplicity Weaponised

The Swachh Bharat Mission exemplifies this approach. When Prime Minister Modi announced in 2014 his vision of a toilet in every household, the idea was widely mocked. 

“There is one thing I want to begin today. There will be a separate toilet for girls in all schools so that our girl students do not run away. I want the MPs to use their funds to build toilets in schools,” Prime Minister Modi had said in his first Independence Day address.

Critics averred that toilets were unworthy of a prime ministerial priority. Yet, the initiative became transformative—not only improving hygiene and public health but restoring dignity to millions, especially women.

The same can be said for the decision to achieve saturation coverage of Jan Dhan Yojana (no-frills bank accounts), rural electrification, rural broadband and the Ujjwala scheme for cooking gas. All of them worked towards empowering women, the long neglected electoral cohort.

Pradeep Gupta of Axis My India summed it up best in his contribution to the edited volume on Modi@20: Dreams Meet Delivery—“While previous governments promised empowerment of women, Modi made it a reality by opening Jan Dhan accounts that enabled them to receive direct cash transfers. Women could have cash in hand that they could call their own and spend according to their wishes. Women became the proud owners of their homes under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. They were no longer at the mercy of the men in their house.Their position was elevated significantly in their homes and, by extension, in society. Everything that was in the files and works, became a reality in the very lifetime of these women.”

The thing is that none of these were novel ideas. Successive governments since Independence had promised them but failed to walk the talk. 

Aadhaar, too, was conceived under the NDA led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, operationalised by Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) under the leadership of Manmohan Singh, and later scaled under Modi. What changed under NDA is the insistence on execution at scale. The government “weaponised” Aadhaar by integrating it with DBTs and digital infrastructure, thereby delivering services to crores of beneficiaries at unprecedented speed.

The results are staggering. In the last decade, the government has provided:

– Over 50 crore new bank accounts.
– Toilets built for 12 crore households.
– Cooking gas connections extended to over 10 crore families.
– Electricity supplied to nearly every village.

The ideas were not new. The delivery was.Further, the over 50 crore beneficiaries or labarthis had morphed into economic agents availing of benefits of the formal system. The political economy of this achievement, wherein this long excluded cohort is inside the economy looking out rather than the other way round, is incredible.

At the same time, the government pursued targeted spending—identifying the beneficiary through their Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile (JAM)—with dramatic outcomes. Not surprising then that over 40 crore people escaped abject poverty. The Niti Aayog estimates that the number of poor in the country is now less than 5 per cent—at the turn of this millennium, this proportion was around 40 per cent.

Obsession with Closure

Undoubtedly, one distinctive feature of Modinomics is the determination to finish what other regimes failed to complete. Sitharaman revealed that Modi, upon taking office, instructed ministers not to announce new projects until the backlog of pending ones was cleared. The examples the finance minister cited are revealing:

λ The Kollam by-pass in Kerala, approved in 1972, completed after five decades;

– The Saryu canal in Bihar, stuck since 1978, finally delivered;
– The Kosi Mahasetu bridge, sanctioned in 2003, opened at last;
– The Bogibeel rail-road bridge in Assam, India’s longest, completed two decades after approval;
– The Atal Tunnel in Himachal Pradesh, conceived in 2000, operationalised in 2020;
– The peripheral expressways around Delhi, proposed in 2006, finished under NDA.

Each of these projects had languished for years in bureaucratic limbo, victims of shifting political winds and administrative lethargy. With the benefit of hindsight, Modi’s intervention injected urgency and accountability. Review meetings with ministers and bureaucrats became routine, and deadlines made non-negotiable.

The result has been a dramatic acceleration in infrastructure rollout. Rural roads, highways, and railways—all saw record expansion in the past decade. For example, development of national highways more than doubled to 9,304km in 2023. Similarly, the rural roads project, since its launch in 2000 till 2014 completed 3.81 lakh km; over the next decade, this grew by 7.23 lakh km.

In this instance, the Modi government mirrors the famous dictum of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese premier who is credited for inspiring the incredible makeover of China: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” 

To be fair, every government since Independence has struggled to match announcement and delivery. The Modi government’s real achievement has been to shrink that gap by insisting on closure, accountability, and saturation.

In this sense, Modinomics is less about reinventing governance than about rediscovering its fundamentals. The lesson is both humbling and profound. Grand visions and complex reforms may inspire national headlines, but it is the completion of everyday tasks—roads, bridges, toilets, bank accounts—that transforms societies.

But why does this simplicity matter politically? Because in a democracy as vast and diverse as India, scale is persuasion. The government’s ability to touch the lives of millions—by democratising access to bank accounts, toilets, gas connections—creates a direct, tangible bond between citizen and state.

All the more, since 60-80 per cent of the lives of the voters intersect with government social welfare schemes. In other words, the presence or absence of welfare services impacts people, especially their aspirations, and is likely to influence their electoral choices.

This direct compact with the government bypasses traditional intermediaries: local elites, party workers, or middlemen. The savings to the national exchequer cumulatively measure over `3 lakh crore. It is not an accident that Modi branded his welfare policies as “Modi ki Guarantee.” The guarantee is experienced at the doorstep, often verified on a mobile phone.

The potential political dividends are obvious. Voters may debate ideology, but they cannot ignore the toilet in their backyard or the subsidy in their account. Governance thus becomes not only a matter of administration but of mass mobilisation.

To be sure, the outcome of the 2024 election, wherein BJP failed to win a majority on its own though NDA crossed the line comfortably, suggests that good governance is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for a favourable poll outcome.

Road Ahead

As India marches toward its centenary in 2047, the challenge will be to sustain this momentum. Especially, since the government has set an audacious task for India: become a developed economy by 2047. This would mean growing India’s per capita income nearly seven-fold to $18,000, over the next 22 years.

India will need breakthroughs in job creation, health, education, and climate resilience. Execution alone cannot address the structural reforms required to boost productivity, create jobs, and adapt to technological disruption.

Moreover, simplicity must not slide into oversimplification. The KISS principle is useful, but governance in a nation of 1.4 billion will always require nuance, compromise, and balance. The centralisation that drives speed today may become a bottleneck tomorrow.

In the final analysis, Modinomics, as articulated by Sitharaman, is less an ideology than a method: Keep it simple, insist on execution, and scale relentlessly. It thrives not on novelty but on closure. It weaponises inherited ideas, delivering them with unprecedented reach.

For its supporters, this is proof of Modi’s administrative genius. For critics, it exposes the fragility of a system too dependent on strong political leadership. Either way, the last decade has changed the grammar of governance in India. 

GDP growthgovernanceIndian economyIndian politicsModi at 75Narendra Modi