Eomar - Diligent News

@write_diligent

I for one find it CrAzY that with the ‘totally US controlled’ waters Iran was somehow able to ‘sneak in’ and find, disable and then tow a sub all the way back to land and into a facility. Wild since we know the ‘whole area’ is definitely ‘under US control’

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Iran Observer

@IranObserver0

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1h

⚡️BREAKING: The IRGC has released Footage of the Seizure of US Navy's Advanced Dive-LD Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

The United States was using it to Detect Mines in the Strait of Hormuz

https://x.com/write_diligent/status/2097410072456389114

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5901645&forum_id=2...#50123023)

so ill trust iran more than anyone, furk u benchod

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5901645&forum_id=2...#50123042)

# **25 Ways Narendra Modi Changed India**

## **Modi Built a More Capable Indian State**

### **1. He turned infrastructure construction into a national priority.**

One of the defining features of the Modi era has been the sheer physical transformation of India.

India has dramatically increased spending on roads, railways, airports, ports, metro systems, power networks and urban infrastructure. National Highway construction accelerated sharply compared with the early 2010s, while the railway system moved toward near-total electrification of its broad-gauge network.

The significance isn't simply that India built more roads and railways.

Infrastructure determines the productivity of everything else.

A factory cannot compete globally if getting its goods to a port takes days. A farmer cannot efficiently reach a market without roads. A city cannot absorb millions of additional workers without transportation infrastructure.

Modi's government made infrastructure one of the central instruments of economic policy rather than treating it primarily as a budgetary expenditure.

### **2. He transformed India's highway-building program.**

India's national-highway network has expanded enormously since 2014, while the pace of construction increased substantially.

But the more important change has been the **scale and ambition of the projects**: expressways, economic corridors, access-controlled highways and large bridges designed to connect industrial and population centers.

Projects such as the Delhi–Mumbai Expressway represent a different conception of Indian transportation infrastructure from the incremental road-building of earlier decades.

The objective increasingly became to reduce **travel time and logistics costs**, not merely to increase the number of kilometers of road.

That matters enormously for India's competitiveness.

### **3. He essentially electrified the Indian railway system.**

Railway electrification is one of the least glamorous but most consequential transformations of the Modi era.

India went from having a substantial portion of its railway network dependent on diesel to electrifying almost the entire broad-gauge network.

That reduces fuel imports, lowers operating costs, improves locomotive performance and allows India to move toward a more efficient railway system.

And electrification was accompanied by station modernization, new trains, track upgrades, dedicated freight corridors and major investment in railway capacity.

India's railway system is increasingly being treated as **economic infrastructure**, rather than simply a passenger transportation service.

### **4. He created the world's most consequential digital public infrastructure experiment.**

India's combination of **Aadhaar, Jan Dhan bank accounts, mobile connectivity and UPI** created something unusual: a digital infrastructure layer on which millions of private businesses can build.

This is one of Modi's most consequential achievements because it is easy to underestimate.

Instead of every government department and company building separate systems for identity, payments and financial transfers, India created interoperable national infrastructure.

The result has been an enormous reduction in the cost of conducting transactions and delivering government benefits.

Other developing countries are now studying India's model.

### **5. He turned UPI into a global phenomenon.**

India's Unified Payments Interface is arguably the most successful piece of financial infrastructure created during the Modi period.

Indians can transfer money between banks almost instantly using a phone, usually at negligible cost.

The scale is extraordinary: UPI now processes **billions of transactions every month**.

More importantly, it has transformed everyday commerce. A street vendor, taxi driver, restaurant or small shop can accept digital payments without needing the expensive card infrastructure that developed economies historically relied upon.

That has helped make India's financial system dramatically more accessible.

### **6. He brought hundreds of millions of Indians into formal banking.**

The **Jan Dhan** program attacked one of India's longstanding problems: enormous numbers of people operating outside the formal financial system.

Hundreds of millions of bank accounts were opened, providing people with access to formal savings, transfers, insurance and other financial services.

Combined with Aadhaar and mobile phones, this produced what became known as the **JAM trinity**.

The significance goes beyond banking.

Once someone has a bank account, governments can transfer money directly to them. Businesses can pay them electronically. They can establish a financial history.

It is part of the gradual formalization of the Indian economy.

### **7. He dramatically expanded direct welfare transfers.**

India's old welfare system was notorious for leakage.

Money could pass through multiple bureaucratic layers before reaching the intended recipient.

The Modi government increasingly moved toward **Direct Benefit Transfers**, sending subsidies and welfare payments directly into beneficiaries' bank accounts.

Aadhaar and digital banking made this possible at enormous scale.

The result is not that corruption disappeared—far from it—but the government acquired a vastly better mechanism for transferring money directly to citizens.

That is a major improvement in state capacity.

### **8. He made sanitation a national political issue.**

The **Swachh Bharat** campaign put sanitation at the center of national politics.

India had long suffered from extremely high rates of open defecation and inadequate sanitation infrastructure. Modi personally made the construction and use of household toilets a highly visible national priority.

The campaign produced the construction of **hundreds of millions of toilets** and a dramatic reduction in reported open defecation.

There are legitimate questions about usage and the quality of some facilities, but the broader achievement remains significant: sanitation went from being an under-discussed infrastructure problem to a central national policy objective.

### **9. He expanded household access to electricity.**

When Modi took office, millions of Indian households still lacked electricity connections.

The government subsequently pursued massive electrification programs, culminating in the claim that virtually every inhabited village had been connected to the electricity grid.

The next challenge became improving **reliability and quality of supply**, rather than merely establishing a connection.

India's electricity-generation capacity has also expanded substantially.

The country still has enormous energy challenges, but the era when large parts of India routinely experienced severe electricity shortages has receded considerably.

### **10. He massively expanded access to LPG cooking fuel.**

The **Ujjwala** program provided subsidized LPG connections to millions of poor households, particularly women.

This addressed an important but frequently overlooked development problem: dependence on biomass and traditional cooking fuels.

Replacing wood and other solid fuels with LPG can dramatically reduce indoor air pollution and the time women spend collecting fuel.

The challenge now is maintaining regular LPG consumption when refill prices rise.

Nevertheless, bringing millions of households into the modern energy economy was a substantial achievement.

---

# **Modi and India's Economic Transformation**

### **11. He implemented GST and created a more integrated national market.**

The **Goods and Services Tax**, introduced in 2017, was one of India's biggest economic reforms in decades.

Before GST, India's internal market was fragmented by a complicated collection of central and state taxes.

Goods moving between states could encounter substantial tax and logistical friction.

GST replaced much of that system with a nationwide indirect-tax framework.

Implementation was messy and the system remains unnecessarily complicated, but the underlying reform was enormous:

**India became more economically integrated.**

For a country of India's size and federal complexity, that is a major achievement.

### **12. He pushed India toward formalization.**

GST was only one part of a much broader formalization process.

Demonetization was extraordinarily disruptive and remains one of Modi's most controversial policies, but it also accelerated the transition toward digital payments and formal financial transactions.

GST, Aadhaar, digital banking, UPI and improved tax administration collectively increased the state's ability to observe and tax economic activity.

The informal economy remains enormous, but India today has a considerably larger formal economic sector than it did a decade ago.

### **13. He made manufacturing a strategic priority.**

India had spent decades discussing manufacturing without achieving the scale that China, Vietnam and other Asian economies achieved.

Modi's **Make in India** campaign attempted to change that.

The government subsequently introduced **Production Linked Incentive (PLI)** programs covering electronics, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, batteries, solar equipment, telecommunications equipment and other industries.

The results are mixed across sectors, but electronics have been particularly striking.

India has gone from being overwhelmingly dependent on imported smartphones to becoming one of the world's largest smartphone assembly/manufacturing centers.

That is a genuine structural change.

### **14. He turned India into a major smartphone manufacturing hub.**

This deserves its own point.

India has become a major manufacturing base for companies including Apple and its suppliers.

iPhone production in India has grown dramatically, and Apple has increasingly diversified production away from China.

That matters because electronics manufacturing creates supply chains around components, logistics, tooling, engineering and skilled labor.

India has not yet replicated China's enormous electronics ecosystem, but it has clearly moved from **almost irrelevant to significant**.

That would have been difficult to imagine at the beginning of the Modi era.

### **15. He dramatically increased India's defense-industrial ambitions.**

India has historically been one of the world's largest arms importers.

Modi's government increasingly pushed **Atmanirbhar Bharat** and indigenous defense production.

India now produces increasingly sophisticated systems domestically, including missiles, artillery, helicopters, naval vessels, aircraft components and electronic systems.

Defense exports have also increased dramatically from the tiny levels of the past.

India remains dependent on foreign technology and imports for many critical systems, particularly advanced aircraft and engines, but the direction has changed.

The goal is no longer simply:

**"How do we buy the weapons we need?"**

It is increasingly:

**"How do we build them ourselves?"**

### **16. He dramatically expanded renewable energy.**

India has added enormous quantities of solar and wind capacity during the Modi era.

Solar power in particular went from being a relatively minor component of India's electricity system to one of the country's most important sources of new generation capacity.

India remains heavily dependent on coal, so it would be inaccurate to portray the country as having completed a green transition.

But the scale of renewable deployment has been impressive, especially given India's enormous electricity requirements and relatively low per-capita income.

### **17. He expanded India's energy infrastructure while maintaining growth.**

Modi's energy policy has been pragmatic rather than purely ideological.

India has simultaneously expanded renewables, coal, nuclear ambitions, LNG infrastructure, petroleum refining and electricity generation.

This reflects a basic reality: India needs enormous quantities of additional energy if it is going to industrialize.

The country's per-capita electricity consumption remains far below that of rich countries.

India therefore needs **more energy of almost every type**, not simply substitution of one source for another.

That energy expansion is essential to any serious manufacturing strategy.

---

# **Modi Changed India's Place in the World**

### **18. He made India a much more consequential geopolitical power.**

India's international influence has increased substantially since 2014.

It is now simultaneously deepening relationships with the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, Israel, the Gulf states and Southeast Asia while maintaining its strategic relationship with Russia.

The **Quad**, India's partnerships in the Indo-Pacific and its growing role in global supply-chain diversification all reflect India's greater geopolitical importance.

India is no longer simply a large developing country whose foreign policy other powers must take into account.

It is increasingly a country that **other major powers actively compete to partner with**.

### **19. He strengthened India's relationship with the United States.**

The India–US relationship has deepened dramatically.

Defense cooperation, technology cooperation, semiconductor investment, critical-mineral partnerships, space cooperation and diplomatic coordination have all expanded.

This is particularly important because India historically maintained considerable distance from US strategic structures.

Modi has moved India substantially closer to Washington without formally abandoning strategic autonomy.

That balancing act is one of the more significant changes in Indian foreign policy.

### **20. He made India a central player in the China-plus-one strategy.**

The deterioration of US-China relations created an enormous opportunity for India.

Companies increasingly want manufacturing bases outside China.

Vietnam, Mexico, India and other countries are competing for this investment.

Modi's government has aggressively marketed India as an alternative manufacturing destination.

India still has serious disadvantages—bureaucracy, infrastructure bottlenecks, land acquisition, labor regulation and relatively low female labor-force participation—but it now has a credible place in the global supply-chain diversification conversation.

---

# **Modi and Indian National Ambition**

### **21. He changed India's perception of what the state could accomplish.**

Perhaps the hardest achievement to quantify is psychological.

For decades, Indian governments frequently announced enormous projects that took years or decades to complete.

The Modi government developed a political culture centered around **large, visible, deadline-driven national projects**.

Whether it is toilets, highways, digital payments, electrification, railways, airports, housing or renewable energy, the emphasis has increasingly been:

**build it at national scale.**

Not every project succeeds and some deadlines are missed.

But the expectation that the Indian government should actually be able to execute enormous projects has changed.

### **22. He made India considerably more ambitious about becoming a manufacturing power.**

India has not yet become "the next China."

That claim would be premature.

Manufacturing's share of GDP has not exploded in the way many supporters expected, and India still employs far too few people in manufacturing relative to its population.

But the political objective has changed.

Previous Indian governments often talked about services as India's inevitable comparative advantage.

Modi increasingly argues that India needs **manufacturing, exports, infrastructure and industrial supply chains** as well.

That is an important strategic correction.

### **23. He turned space exploration into a national project.**

India's space program predates Modi by decades, and it would be wrong to attribute India's space achievements entirely to him.

But the Modi government has strongly emphasized India's space ambitions.

The **Chandrayaan-3** lunar landing was a landmark achievement, making India the first country to successfully land near the Moon's south polar region.

India is also pursuing Gaganyaan, expanded commercial space activity and a larger private-sector role in the space industry.

India's space program increasingly reflects the country's broader ambition to become a technologically sophisticated major power.

### **24. He made India much more assertive internationally.**

Modi's India is considerably more comfortable projecting its interests.

That is visible in India's approach to China, Pakistan, Russia, the Gulf, the United States and the Global South.

India has also become increasingly willing to pursue its own interests even when they conflict with Western preferences—for example, maintaining major Russian energy relationships while simultaneously deepening strategic cooperation with Washington.

That is essentially **strategic autonomy with greater leverage**.

India is attempting to become powerful enough that it does not have to choose a single geopolitical camp.

### **25. He changed the trajectory—and expectations—of India.**

This is ultimately the strongest case for Modi.

India is not yet a developed country.

It still has enormous poverty by rich-country standards, weak human capital in many regions, underemployment, agricultural problems, inadequate urban infrastructure and a manufacturing sector that remains too small relative to its population.

Those problems are real.

But compare the India of 2014 with the India of today.

The country has:

**more infrastructure, more electricity, more digitalization, more formal banking, more tax collection, more manufacturing capacity, more defense production, more renewable energy, more global investment, a vastly larger digital-payments ecosystem and considerably greater geopolitical influence.**

The biggest achievement may therefore be less any individual policy than a change in the **capacity and ambition of the Indian state**.

India's next challenge is much harder.

The easy gains—bank accounts, toilets, electricity connections, digital payments, highways—are increasingly exhausted.

The next phase requires reforms that are politically much more difficult:

**better schools, better universities, higher female employment, agricultural reform, urbanization, labor-intensive manufacturing, stronger competition, easier business regulation, judicial reform and much greater integration into global supply chains.**

If Modi's India can make that second transition, the infrastructure and digital foundations built during the first phase could become the foundation for something much larger:

**India moving from a large developing economy to a genuine industrial and technological great power.**

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5901645&forum_id=2...#50123074)