• Adv. Rajiv Sharma

In the first instalment of this series, we examined how the Modi government surrendered India’s strategic autonomy, from the Chabahar fiasco, to its failure to continue importing cheap Iranian oil under US pressure, to the lopsided trade framework negotiated with Washington. These were just a few examples of how this government has repeatedly compromised the national interest abroad. This second instalment turns inward, to the self-inflicted economic wounds that Narendra Modi’s government has visited upon ordinary Indians over twelve years, wounds inflicted not by any foreign power, but entirely of the Prime Minister’s own making. If the first instalment was a story of surrender abroad, this is a story of sabotage at home.

‘The Note-Bandi Catastrophe’

On the night of November 8, 2016, Prime Minister Modi arbitrarily announced demonetisation, without consulting the Reserve Bank of India, without any parliamentary debate, and without preparing the banking system for the shock. The demonetization was ordered on a foolish premise that the cash was predominantly “black money”, which inflicted immense, needless pain on ordinary citizens.

Speaking in the Rajya Sabha, Dr Manmohan Singh called it an “organised loot and legalised plunder of the common people,” and warned that the government’s unwarranted decision could shave at least two percentage points off GDP growth. Demonetisation dealt a body blow to the economy, devastating the unorganised sector in particular. Small and medium businessmen, traders, and farmers were pushed to the brink, while crores of Indians lost their jobs and livelihoods overnight.

‘The GST Fiasco’

Barely eight months later, before the wounds of demonetisation had even begun to heal, the Modi government rushed through the Goods and Services Tax on July 1, 2017. GST was designed in haste, imposed without adequate federal consultation, and rolled out before the technological infrastructure to support it was ready. The result was a bewildering multiplicity of tax slabs and a compliance architecture so complex that it overwhelmed small and medium enterprises. GST devastated the informal economy and eroded the fiscal autonomy of India’s states, reducing them to supplicants before the Union government. Honest businessmen were buried under compliance burdens, while dishonest tax evaders found new loopholes to exploit.

‘Modi Government’s Unforgivable Covid Blunders’

Narendra Modi’s handling of India’s two Covid waves was arguably among the worst in the world. The government’s own recklessness fuelled the pandemic’s spread: Modi permitted massive election rallies and religious gatherings, including the crowds at Kumbh Mela, even as infections surged. His response from the theatrics of “taali, thaalibajao,” to announcing the world’s most stringent lockdown on March 24, 2020, with virtually no notice, to continuing to export Covid vaccines and medicines even as Indians were dying for want of them.

During the catastrophic second wave of April-May 2021, hospitals ran out of oxygen, bodies floated down the Ganga or were buried in mass graves along its banks for want of cremation capacity, and a healthcare system that had over a year’s warning remained utterly unprepared. Most damning of all was the cover-up of the true death toll: official figures record roughly 481,000 Covid deaths, yet the WHO estimated India’s true toll could be as high as 65 lakh. India’s own delayed 2021 civil registration data revealed 2.4 million excess deaths in that year alone, a nearly six-to-tenfold undercount that the government dismissed rather than explained. This cover-up meant that the families of millions of Covid victims were denied the compensation that was rightfully theirs.

‘A Government that Hides and Manipulates its Own Economic Data’

This pattern of concealment extends well beyond Covid. The Modi government has repeatedly been accused of suppressing or manipulating unfavourable economic indicators, eroding the credibility of India’s official statistics on the world stage. This crisis of trust was laid bare in the IMF’s 2025 Article IV review, which rated India’s national accounts a “C”, which is the second-lowest grade on the Fund’s four-tier scale. When a government’s own economic data including the GDP data is no longer trusted by the world’s premier financial institution, no claim of growth can be taken at face value.

‘Rising Unemployment and Stagnating Incomes’

Over the past twelve years, unemployment has become one of India’s most persistent economic wounds. CMIE data show the unemployment rate touching 9.2% in June 2024, with youth and graduate unemployment running far higher, and female unemployment hitting 18.5% that same month. The 2017-18 NSSO survey, which was initially withheld by the government due to an election, had already revealed unemployment at a 45-year high of 6.1%.

Alongside joblessness, wages have stagnated brutally. Labour Bureau data show that real rural wages, which had grown at nearly 7% annually between 2007-08 and 2014-15, have since flatlined to near-zero growth, with real rural wages actually contracting in 2024. Corporate profits tell a starkly different story: Nifty 500 companies saw profits jump 22.3% in FY24, while employment at these very firms grew by a mere 1.5%. This has exposed Modi’s growth model that enriches capitalists while starving labour.

Compounding this humiliation, India’s per capita GDP, once 40% higher than Bangladesh’s, was overtaken by Bangladesh in 2020, when Bangladesh’s $1,998 outstripped India’s $1,965. It happened due to six years of sluggish Indian growth. Even as India has since edged marginally ahead at current prices, the fact that Bangladesh came within touching distance at all is a damning indictment of this government’s economic stewardship.

The Mirage of ‘Make in India’

Prime Minister Modi launched ‘Make in India’ promising to transform the country into a global manufacturing powerhouse. Twelve years later, manufacturing’s share of GDP has actually fallen, from over 16% in 2014 to around 12% today. Meanwhile, Modi has presided over a steady deepening of India’s dependence on Chinese imports since 2015, slowly hollowing out domestic industry. Even after China’s 2020 aggression in Galwan, in which twenty Indian soldiers were killed and hundreds of square kilometres of Indian territory were occupied, the Modi government’s imports from China only grew, from around $70 billion in 2019 to nearly $127 billion by 2024. Now, this government has negotiated a trade framework with the United States that will open India’s markets to American products, including agricultural goods. This deal threatens to deliver a further blow to domestic industry and a potentially fatal one to India’s farming sector. As Leader of the Opposition Shri Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly pointed out, Narendra Modi is dismantling India’s small and medium industries to benefit a handful of big industrialists close to him.

‘The Epidemic of Paper Leaks’

Year after year, India’s students have been betrayed by an epidemic of examination paper leaks. From NEET to state-level recruitment and board examinations, hardly a year has passed in the last decade without reports of leaked papers, cancelled exams, and re-conducted tests that have derailed the academic calendars and mental health of lakhs of aspirants preparing for careers in medicine, engineering, and government service. This is not a series of isolated lapses but a systemic collapse of institutional integrity, brought about by the Modi government’s decision to hand over the conduct of these examinations to unreliable private bodies with poor, and at times corrupt, communal management.

The human cost has been catastrophic. At least 13 aspirants took their own lives in the six weeks following the 2026 NEET cancellation alone. At his ‘Chhatron Ki Goonj’ rally in Kota, Shri Rahul Gandhi displayed the suicide note of NEET aspirant Akanksha Chaturvedi, telling the crowd: “I want all of us to work together to ensure that no student in this country ever feels what this girl felt.” He cited data showing that student suicides have risen by 65% over the past decade.

Mr. Gandhi described India’s examination system as functioning like an extortion racket. NEET aspirants alone, he said, collectively spend nearly 1.32 lakh crore annually on coaching and fees, almost equal to India’s entire education budget. Widening the lens to five major examinations (NEET, JEE, UPSC, SSC, and RRB), he put combined aspirant spending at nearly 3.5 lakh crore a year, matching the combined education budgets of India’s states. “India’s education system,” he said, “is an extortion machine and a system designed to reject and discard aspirants rather than provide them opportunities.”

Mr. Gandhi further pointed out that the Modi government has cut education spending from 4.7% of the budget a decade ago to just 2.4% today, and that nearly one lakh government schools have shut down in the same period. The government, he argued, is systematically dismantling public education while encouraging costly private institutions, making quality education inaccessible to the poor and the marginalised.

Modi government’s education record is thus one of shrinking public investment alongside the tightening grip of exam mafias on the system. While families spend their life’s savings on their children’s education, the government has looted them and ruined the careers of budding students. This is not an administrative failure. This is a betrayal of an entire generation.

‘Country’s Reputation, its Passport and Currency on Decline’

Modi’s frequent foreign visits and awkward, often theatrical conduct with world leaders have increasingly drawn ridicule rather than respect, denting rather than building India’s standing. Even after ‘Operation Sindoor’, when India dispatched All-Party delegations to 32 countries to make its case, the reaction of most governments was lukewarm, a sobering reminder of how much diplomatic capital this government has had to spend simply to be heard.

The numbers are just as unforgiving. The Indian passport, once inching toward the top rungs of global mobility indices, has for years languished in the mid-to-high seventies and eighties on the Henley Passport Index. Meanwhile, the rupee, which traded near 58 to the US dollar when Modi took office in 2014, has since collapsed past the 95 mark in 2026, its steepest and most humiliating fall in the currency’s post-Independence history.

‘A Government of Slogans, Not Substance, which has failed India’

Twelve years of Narendra Modi’s leadership offer a single, unmistakable pattern: bold announcements followed by broken delivery, and broken lives left to bear the cost. Demonetisation promised to end black money but delivered only economic devastation. GST promised ‘One nation, One tax’ but delivered a compliance nightmare that crushed small businesses and bankrupted the states. ‘Make in India’ promised a manufacturing renaissance but delivered a shrinking industrial base and deepening dependence on the very neighbour that seized Indian territory. Covid management promised decisive leadership but delivered mass death, concealed behind manipulated statistics. An entire generation of students has been sacrificed to an examination system run for profit rather than merit. And through it all, the rupee has crumbled, wages have stagnated, unemployment has soared, and India’s own economic data has become so unreliable that even the IMF no longer takes it at face value.

This is the real legacy of Modi government: not the triumphant nation of slogans projected on giant hoardings and prime-time television, but a country of shuttered schools, jobless graduates, ruined small businesses, and grieving families still awaiting an honest account of what this government cost them. A government that governs by slogan cannot indefinitely outrun the substance of its failures. After twelve years, the substance has caught up with Narendra Modi.

(The Author is General Secretary and Chief Spokesperson of Chandigarh Pradesh Congress)

This is the second and last of the series of write-ups on “Modi’s 12 years of broken promises”.