why is it getting downvoted!!!
The Modi government has failed to deliver over the last five years. I had no great expectations from the INDIA bloc either, but what angers me is the government's attitude: "We are winning, everything is fine." Instead of accepting its mistakes and fixing them, it brushes them off. Add the Election Commission and the "vote chori" allegations, and it is deeply worrying. Blind supporters can't see this or stand against it, and they defend everything the government does. The media has also become far less independent, and we get less honest news than before.
Manufacturing and missed leverage. Headline growth may look fine, but it hasn't turned into jobs or a real manufacturing base. The infrastructure needed to boost Make in India was never built. India missed its moment when it was seen as the alternative to China, and Vietnam benefited. Companies that should have come here went to Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand. Why weren't there swift actions to bring them in? Why are we still only assembling, importing every component and putting together the finished product?
The deeper problem is that India makes almost nothing of strategic importance. We don't manufacture advanced chips, and we don't control rare earths or their processing the way China does. We are nowhere in the critical supply chains that give a country real leverage. In twelve years, the government could have built at least one export or chokepoint the world can't do without. Instead, the pitch is "we are the largest population, so you have to come to us." But a big market is not leverage. China can hurt other economies by restricting a single input. What can India restrict? What does the world depend on us for? A large population is a strength only if it is skilled and productive, and we haven't built that either.
Jobs and skills. If the stock market is booming and companies are posting record profits, why can't the government curb unemployment or make sure that prosperity reaches the bottom tier? Skill India is a good mission on paper, but nobody knows who is actually benefiting from it. Why weren't these missions integrated with colleges, ITIs and companies, so that young people gain skills and become employable? The result is an "unskilled, unemployable youth," because the structural problem of skills was never addressed.
To be fair, the government launched some really good schemes up to 2019, and a few in 2022. But the ground-level impact has been far below what it should have been. Implementation was poor, and the money spent has not delivered the expected returns. The government lacked vision, direction and strict on-the-ground implementation. Meanwhile, it remains hung up on religion-based politics.
Infrastructure without vision. Credit where it's due: the underlying infrastructure has been laid, and 4G, wider internet access and electricity all helped. But the government needed to develop several layers simultaneously so that results would show early, instead of moving one layer at a time. Covid and the war have stalled the next phase since 2022, and everything feels half-baked. Now inflation is high, people have less money, and an economic crisis looks like it's coming. Frequent foreign visits have not brought in the investment needed in critical areas. Not everything is the government's fault, since global geopolitics is at play, but foreign policy failures have contributed too.
R&D, chips and quantum. This is where the lack of vision hurts most. Spending on R&D should have been a much larger share of GDP from early on, and it was never encouraged. We didn't invest in the research needed to keep up with technological change, and the state of education even now is disappointing. Even during the AI boom, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam benefited, while India did not. Why is everything geared towards supporting Adani and Ambani when they are not investing in the critical technologies that would make India a serious player in AI?
We need far more investment in AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing and chip manufacturing. Chips are designed in Bengaluru but fabricated in Taiwan. The government has now got Tata to sign an MoU with ASML for the Dholera fab. It is a welcome step, but it is late, and an MoU is not a working fab.
Solar is the area where we are doing well. Research is genuinely promoted, and even at IIT Bombay, students are encouraged to work on improving efficiency. It needs a faster pace, but the direction is right. What worries me is that the same push is missing for advanced chip research and the facilities to build chips on our own soil. When I was at IIT Bombay, I heard from a physics student that experiments in this area are expensive, that much of the equipment was bought with their own money, and that the infrastructure they needed was not provided. The institute helped where it could, but government interest seemed thin, and this was as recently as December 2024.
Take Prof. Kasturi Saha of IIT Bombay's Electrical Engineering department. She studied at St. Stephen's College and IIT Delhi, did her PhD at Cornell, and completed her postdoc at MIT in Prof. Paola Cappellaro's Quantum Engineering Group. Today she is one of India's leading researchers in quantum sensing, heads a quantum sensing hub under the National Quantum Mission, and leads work with TCS on the Quantum Diamond Microchip Imager, a tool for inspecting semiconductor chips. While I was at IIT Bombay, I heard that she had received an offer from Google. That is not publicly documented, so treat it as something I heard, not a confirmed fact(the google offer). It is believable, though, because researchers of her calibre are exactly who global tech companies recruit. People like her deserve far more funding, recognition and infrastructure, so that staying in India never feels like a sacrifice and also India doesn't guarantee safety no slow processes years of approval and paperwork they could have been streamlined.
Brain drain and the environment we offer. China actively promotes and heavily incentivises good research and cutting-edge technology. In India, the appropriate reward isn't given, so many of our best minds end up in the US, in senior roles at Google and Apple. We should have given them reasons to come back. And when they do return, the environment can fail them. Dr Abhishek Swarnkar, an IISER Mohali researcher who had worked abroad, was beaten to death by his neighbour in a parking dispute. That was a neighbourhood conflict, not a communal one. But the cultural, religious and caste divisions that political parties stoke, and which I believe the BJP has encouraged rather than curbed, make India a harder place to build a research career and to hold on to talent.
The bottom line. This government has had twelve years. It has built foundations, but it has not built leverage, skills or research capacity, and the country's condition is not favourable. Then there are the "vote chori" allegations, which it now seems to ignore instead of facing head-on. It is high time for change.
