Half Done

At a gathering of top CEOs in August last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while putting forth his vision for healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, education and poverty alleviation, said it would become a reality by 2022. When Debjani Ghosh, the then Intel India head and now President, Nasscom, said that before 2022 he would have to face another election in 2019 and asked if this meant he was confident of a victory, Modi replied he was giving a vision for the country's 75th year of independence.

This cuts into the heart of any assessment of his government as its completes four years in power. While it has accomplished a number of challenging tasks such as introducing Goods and Services Tax, Bankruptcy Code and big infrastructure projects by the time Modi starts his campaign for the 2019 elections, a big chunk of his transformational agenda will still be work in progress. As for the potentially politically damaging land, labour and education reforms, well, these have not even been picked up as yet.

How Long is Long Term?

Even the most strident Modi critics agree that he has avoided short term growth fixes which, in the Indian context, usually means following loose fiscal policies, although some critics, such as former finance minister and BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, say the government has frittered away the savings from extremely low oil prices over the past four years or so. It is difficult to counter this argument as the savings have been huge indeed. Consider this: Even though crude oil and petroleum product imports rose to 268 million tonnes (MT) in