Opinion | Twelve Years, Twelve Decisions: How PM Narendra Modi Remade India

After the most significant recalibration of Indian statecraft since Independence, India no longer asks for a seat at the table. It sets the agenda

When Narendra Modi walked into 7, Lok Kalyan Marg, as Prime Minister in May 2014, India was the world’s eleventh-largest economy. It was a nation of vast potential but was plagued by fitful governance, perpetually negotiating coalitions that hedged its ambitions. Twelve years on, India has surpassed Japan to become the fourth-largest economy, with its GDP more than doubling from $2.1 trillion to $4.18 trillion.

This arc has been the product of decisions, some sweeping, some surgical, but all of them consequential. Together, they amount to the most significant recalibration of Indian statecraft since Independence. Not all of them were without controversy. But the cumulative effect is undeniable: India no longer asks for a seat at the table. It sets the agenda. Each of the following pivotal decisions marked a distinct phase in this transformation.

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The End of Coalition Paralysis

Thirty years is a long time to wait for a majority. When the BJP won 282 seats in 2014, it was the first time since Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide that a single party had crossed the halfway mark on its own. What that number meant in practice was simple: no regional partner could hold reform hostage. Under the UPA, bills on GST, insurance, FDI, and pension liberalisation had been blocked, watered down, or referred endlessly to committees by allies whose voters stood to lose from them. The Trinamool Congress, the SP, and the Left parties had each wielded the veto at different moments. After 2014, they could no longer. PM Modi’s 2019 majority was even larger, and when 2024 produced a tighter result, the NDA still commanded enough seats to govern without paralysis. For structural reform, the mandate was the prerequisite for everything else that followed. This stable backing underpinned subsequent bold governance moves.

On the night of November 8, 2016, Indians were told that the 500-rupee and 1,000-rupee notes in their pockets would cease to be legal tender by midnight. The move withdrew 86 per cent of circulating currency in a single announcement. The short-term damage was real and well-documented: quarterly GDP growth fell by roughly 1.5 percentage points, and cash queues outside banks stretched across the country for weeks. While the measure’s effectiveness at eliminating black money remains hotly debated among economists and policymakers, its impact on accelerating formalisation was clearer. Before that night, cash was simply what Indians used. Afterwards, millions opened bank accounts, downloaded payment apps, and discovered that digital transactions worked. The India Stack that followed had a readier public because of it. As the economic landscape shifted, the focus soon turned to tax reforms.

GST had been in the works since 2000, when a committee was first constituted to design a unified indirect tax. It took 17 more years to arrive. When it did, in July 2017, it replaced 17 central and state taxes and 13 cesses with a single framework covering the whole country. The results are now written into the revenue data. Gross GST collections in FY 2024-25 reached a record Rs 22.08 lakh crore, growing 9.4 per cent year on year. The average monthly collection stood at........

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