Ladies and gentlemen, anyway, so good evening and welcome to this session. Uh, I am a reforms historian.

So, the job of a reforms historian is actually quite difficult. It's like performing an open-heart surgery. The reforms are still underway and I'm writing about those. So, and it's also very emotionally close to things as they happen. So, to be truthful and to be acceptable—both are a difficult act to manage. But public memory is short, so it is my job as a reforms historian to re-rekindle it.

So from 1991 to 2010 the reform period was excellent. The performance of the country was very, very good. Uh, the governments of the day were performing well. However, 2010 onwards there was a big problem. Uh, the whole country was facing utter hopelessness. There was policy paralysis. There were these EGoM—you know, Empowered Group of Ministers—uh, each one of them chaired by Pranab Mukherjee, where every decision used to go and get stuck. They were like these great towers of power with no accountability.

There were corruption scandals galore—there was the Commonwealth Games scandal, there was telecom, there was coal. So wherever you look you would find that there was a scandal, and it was very difficult to hold your head up in the community of nations and tell people that, you know, no, things are all right in India.

GDP growth had fallen to a new low. Inflation was high, interest rates were high, and joblessness was rampant. Jobless growth was a term that was coined that time.

Uh, those of you who recall, there was Jairam Ramesh and, followed by Jayanthi Natarajan, at the Environment Ministry. Between the two people, they probably knocked off 2% of India’s GDP by sitting on all environmental clearances that there were, and the incremental capital-to-output ratio was very, very bad in those days.

So this was the scenario when a beacon of hope opened in Gujarat. Uh, I remember it was 17th of August 2013. Modi Ji had organized a conference on rural development and Panchayati Raj in Gujarat at Mahatma Mandir, where I had gone, and that is where he talked about his idea of building the Statue of Unity. And since people present in the room were all farmers, his connect was so strong. He told them that [Music] statue… and the crowd really went very emotional—“Modi, Modi, Modi.” That thing is still reverberating in my head and in my mind.

That was a time when Modi Ji was not even announced as the prime ministerial candidate. There was a chance that he would be the prime ministerial candidate. So obviously the opposition was worried about it. So some people were trying to build a narrative on: if Modi Ji comes in, then the economy will suffer because his economic credentials are not so good. In fact, there was a senior minister who made a statement that the knowledge of Modi Ji on economics can fit behind a postage stamp.

So that was the time I went and I met Modi Ji and he told me—and I told him—that, “Sir, I think your knowledge of economics is about the same. But your approach is different. You know, the current dispensation is looking at pure economics and economic outcomes. You are looking at economics which is inclusive and governance which is inclusive.” So if you look at—as a reforms historian I can tell you—post 1991, while a lot of reform happened in the economy, the governance reform did not take place. And had the governance reform taken place, the Indian story today would have been very different.

Anyway, so I wrote this book Modinomics. It was the first authorized account of the Gujarat model and it was released in this very room on 14th February 2014, before the elections. Soon the elections came and the result was a resounding victory.

Just before that I had met a very senior minister in the UPA government who was very keen to understand what was my first impression of Modi Ji—first-hand impression of Modi Ji. So he asked me, and I was replying to him candidly. And he also asked me; I asked him a question that I was, you know, itching to ask. I said, “What do you think is going to be the election result going to look like?” And he said that, “I think we will be back, maybe with a lesser majority but a bigger coalition.” And I asked him, “What if Mr. Modi gets absolute majority?” He was taken aback and he kindly said that, “We would have made a big mistake.”

Which means that the people at the helm of power had no inkling whatsoever of the kind of sea change that was happening. People today try to make a narrative of what is happening in Bangladesh, what is happening in Nepal. Actually something much bigger than that happened—and happened democratically—during the elections in 2014, when Modi Ji was sworn in with such a huge majority.

Come 15 August 2014, from the ramparts of the Red Fort, he introduced the Jan Dhan Yojana. A month later my book Defeating Poverty: Jan Dhan and Beyond came out, which laid out how, based on what he is doing, India is going to be defeating poverty over the next period of time. And 25 crore people have come out of chronic poverty in this 10 years or 11 years that he's been at the helm.

Similarly, in 2016 he launched the new Digital India program. The big difference was that from e-Governance we moved to making India into a digital economy. And the results are very apparent—today our transactions are higher than all other countries put together.

In 2017 there was a question mark on all this—growth is there and all is there, but where are the jobs? So we released our first study on Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana which showed how 5.5 crore new jobs had been generated through self-employment through Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana.

In 2019, when he talked about India 2030—10-trillion economy—I came up with this book which laid the roadmap. Then came COVID, so we had to revise it. And then came the book India 2047: High Income with Equity, which talks about inclusive growth of India. When we say India 2047, we mean to say it should have growth that is job-generative, it is spatially dispersed, it is sustainable and it is equitable.

Come elections 2024, again there was a big noise about jobs—or lack of them. So I think this whole narrative about jobs in offices and factories is incorrect for India. For a population as large as 1.4 billion, self-employment is a very key component. And that is where we find that almost 5.5 crore new jobs were being generated every year during the past 11 years. About 50–55 odd crores of new livelihoods happened in this time period because of all these initiatives.

I have done six books on Modi Ji so far. So when I realized that he's going to be finishing his 25 years in public office—which is going to be on the 2nd of October—and it is his 75th birthday, I thought the best tribute one could pay to him was to bring together this journey. Because I was one of the very few people who had a first-hand account. I had a first-hand account not from him, not from Government of Gujarat, but from the people whose lives changed because of Modi Ji. Because we travel across the country and we chronicle case studies, we chronicle people and their voices as to what changed for them.

And all of that is encapsulated in this book called Modinomics: A Journey of Inclusive Growth. And I think that Viksit Bharat—India 2047, which has got spatially dispersed, job-generative, equitable and sustainable growth, is going to happen in front of all of us with your help. Jai Hind.

Participants at the Intersection of Democracy: Federalism Finance and Development