Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Narendra Modi has overwhelmed the media. He is everywhere. Recently he debuted on Instagram and had millions of views overnight. That is not the only news. For somebody who has lived longer than Gen Z, it reminds us of 1980s. Rajiv Gandhi was everywhere for a few years and then he flopped and lost elections. Opposition is hoping that it will happen soon. But their wait is extended by 5 years on every general election. But the danger of overwhelming the public exists.
The Political Dualism of Modi
If we observe Narendra Modi closely, we observe a deep political dualism. On the global stage, he presents himself as a civilizational statesman. He orchestrates India’s entry into a multipolar “New World Order” with grand strategic maneuvers, bilateral sweeps, and economic assertions.
Yet, when the focus shifts inward, this visionary architect is replaced by a granular, vertical “Project Manager”. He appears as a leader who manages the state not through deep institutional governance, but through a portfolio of centralized, high-visibility deliverables.
The Global Statesman and the New World Order
Narendra Modi’s foreign policy has successfully positioned India as a crucial “Middle Power.” We are now capable of multi-alignment in a shifting geopolitical landscape. India does not act as a junior partner in Western-led alliances or a passive observer of Sino-American competition. India has aggressively pursued its national interest through Strategic Autonomy. It consists of bilateral pragmatism and strategic connectivity.
This statesmanship is visible across several key theatres:
1. The Architecture of Connectivity: IMEC and Cyprus
Modi has recognized that modern trade routes are the plumbing of geopolitical power. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), with Cyprus serving as its critical Mediterranean anchor, represents a direct challenge to unilateral global infrastructure plays like China’s Belt and Road Initiative. By linking Indian ports to European markets through the Middle East, India has asserted its role as a central hub of global logistics.
2. The Arctic and Nordic Alliances
From bilateral summits in Stockholm and the Hague to deep Arctic partnerships with Norway, the administration has systematically built relationships with secondary European powers. These are not merely symbolic visits. They represent concrete negotiations over technology transfers, space collaboration, and resource security. They demonstrate an understanding that the global order is no longer unipolar or bipolar, but a network of specialized coalitions.
3. The Rupee’s Silent Revolution
At the economic level, the push for de-dollarization and international trade settlement in Indian Rupees (INR) is a direct assertion of monetary sovereignty. By creating alternative payment mechanisms, India shields its economy from unilateral Western sanctions. At the same time, it lays the groundwork for the rupee to become a regional trade currency.
Abroad, the language is civilizational, strategic, and systemic. Modi behaves as a global statesman representing an “eternal city” meeting other eternal cities. He is negotiating the terms of a new multipolar reality.
But local governance meets a contrast.
The Project Manager and the Governance Deficit
A project manager’s primary objective is to ship deliverables. In this framework, governance is reduced to a series of vertical, centrally driven programs: Swachh Bharat (building toilets), Ayushman Bharat (health cards), highway expansion, and digital payment rails (UPI).
While these schemes have delivered genuine successes, they reveal three systemic governance failures:
1. PRAGATI Dashboard or Admission of Collapsed Administration
A project manager launches a product and moves to the next ticket. Durable governance, however, requires institutional feedback loops. You need independent regulators, active opposition scrutiny, local municipal accountability, and responsive administrative channels. In the current model, these correction mechanisms are absent. Members of Parliament (MPs) and Legislative Assemblies (MLAs) have been demoted. They are no longer policy-makers and feedback channels. They are not even ribbon-cutters for central schemes. Modi does that all by himself.
The ultimate proof of this structural failure is the Prime Minister’s personal project monitoring dashboard. It is called PRAGATI (Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation). It was launched in 2015. PRAGATI is a monthly interactive platform where the Prime Minister engages directly with state chief secretaries and district collectors.
Note that these collectors still carry the colonial title of “district magistrates.” They still have four-member personal staff called driver, orderly, peon, and personal assistant. Just like the British Indian “District Magistrates.”
Thus, the PM personally unblocks lagging national projects, fast-tracking infrastructure worth trillions of rupees. While marketed as an efficiency win, PRAGATI is actually a damning indictment of the state. If standard ministerial channels and local administrative systems functioned reliably, the head of government would not need to personally act as a project manager to resolve local sewage pipeline delays or highway land acquisition bottlenecks.
The PM functioning as the ultimate escalation point shows that the middle tier of administrative accountability has completely collapsed. A king who must personally check if the local sewage lines are being cleaned is not a sovereign, but a clerk in a crown.
2. The Digital Highway and the Bureaucratic Counter-Attack
The administration’s digital push (Aadhaar, DigiLocker, online tax filing) was designed as a disintermediation weapon. The goal was to bypass the discretionary power of the local bureaucrat. By connecting the citizen directly to a database, the state sought to eliminate rent-seeking middle-men. Yet, the unreformed bureaucracy has launched a successful counterattack at the implementation margins. They are clawing back the power that technology tried to remove.
The DigiLocker Friction
DigiLocker was launched in 2015 with clear legal backing under the Information Technology Act. The law mandates that digital documents issued through the app carry the same legal weight as physical ones. Yet, a decade later, implementation remains broken. Local officials routinely reject digital documents, forcing citizens to carry physical paper. Banks insist on photocopies duly verified by account-holders. Traffic police demand a physical copy of driving license and registration. It is happening at a distance of one kilometer from the residence of President of India. The government seems to have no clue. It launched the project and moved on.
The friction is so persistent that in 2025, the UT Adviser for Chandigarh had to issue a formal executive order warning departments to accept DigiLocker documents and stop demanding paper.
Furthermore, DigiLocker’s design contains internal gatekeeping. Only “issuer-pushed” documents carry official status, while user-uploaded scans are rejected. This leaves citizens stranded if their issuing university or regional transport office hasn’t onboarded. When citizens ask official helpdesks what to do when a government clerk refuses to accept the digital form, the official responses sidestep the enforcement failure entirely. They offer technical jargon instead of accountability.
The digilocker could integrate citizens digital signature feature but who cares. The project is executed. Now go home. No feedback or improvement is required except to ensure that it does not crash.
The ITR Complexity
A prime example of digital friction is the Income Tax Return (ITR) filing process. In a citizen-centric system, the state would ask a simple question: “Does this individual owe tax?” If the answer is no, the process should be minimal. Instead, the forms are designed around bureaucratic categories rather than citizen utility.
Consider a mid-career professional earning below the exempt limit of 12 lakh rupees. Under any sensible tax system, their filing should take minutes. But if they happen to have ordinary assets, like two self-occupied houses, professional fees, capital gains (short or long-term), and minor royalty income, guess what happens?
The digital system forces them into the most complex ITR forms. Irony is that they have to create this form online by adding different schedules to it. They must navigate dozens of complex schedules, disclosure sheets, and technical terms, even though their net tax liability remains zero.
To escape this administrative nightmare, citizens have devised a private workaround. They deliberately misclassify their income into wrong but simpler categories. They voluntarily pay tax they do not owe, simply to access the simpler ITR forms and hit submit. The taxpayer literally pays a “complexity fee” to the state to buy peace of mind. The government points to rising filing numbers as proof of voluntary compliance, completely blind to the fact that the data actually measures the avoidance of their forms.
The GST Compliance Trap
The Goods and Services Tax (GST) was sold as a modern, unified indirect tax that would eliminate state-level borders and simplify business. That has happened. Goods move faster within India. Goods can reach from Chennai to New Delhi in 3-4 days. Unheard of in previous regime. But the good news ends there.
In reality, it has digitized a complex excise regime. It is a direct tax with the mechanics of indirect tax. At the classification layer, GST still runs on HSN (Harmonized System of Nomenclature) codes inherited from the colonial-era Customs Tariff Act.
Instead of taxing consumption simply, the bureaucracy continues to classify goods based on their raw materials and manufacturing methods. This has led to absurd legal disputes. Flavored milk is taxed at a different rate than chocolate milk, dry idli-dosa batter is taxed differently from wet batter, and “fryums” are taxed differently from traditional “papad.” State-level authorities issue contradictory advance rulings on near-identical items, leaving small businesses in a state of perpetual legal uncertainty.
Worse, the system is designed to punish procedural errors rather than systemic evasion. Missing a single GST registration or filing deadline can trigger immediate cancellation of registration, blocking of input tax credits, and heavy financial penalties. This turns a digital business tool into a bureaucratic trap.
Let’s not even talk about the cost of obtaining registration of GST. The demands of bribes to hurry up the process. Imagine that there is no clock and no accountability. Applications will be rejected with queries. Dealer pays again to seek appointment and soon gives up to the middle man to handle it.
Welcome to the new Sales Tax Office in the cloud but back pocket on the ground.
3. The Looming Maintenance Crisis (“Double Incumbency”)
The political incentive structure rewards the announcement and launch of a project rather than its long-term upkeep. Because of this, India is heading toward a massive maintenance deficit. Broken highways, defunct government websites with no webmaster contacts, late trains, and half-completed Smart Cities are early warning signs.
Modi’s successor will not inherit the luxury of launching new flagship schemes. Instead, they will face Double Incumbency. They will inherit the debt of unfinished projects alongside the rapid decay of existing infrastructure. They will be stuck with outdated products that people may have stopped using as no one worked on feedback to improve. In fact, there is no mechanism for feedback.
Political Fragility and Public Capitulation
A project-manager state is fundamentally transactional. This makes it highly fragile under political pressure. Because the administration lacks durable institutional feedback loops, it struggles to process public discontent. It oscillates between stubborn silence and sudden, chaotic capitulation. This pattern is visible in two major recent events:
1. The Farm Laws Repeal
The 2020 Farm Laws represented the most significant agrarian reforms in five decades. They allowed farmers to sell their produce directly to private buyers outside state-regulated monopolies. Despite their economic merit, the laws were passed without parliamentary consensus or deep consultation with farmer unions. The result was a year of sustained protests at Delhi’s borders. Lacking an institutional mediation channel, the government finally capitulated in November 2021. They repealed the laws entirely ahead of crucial state elections. Yet it lost the elections magnificently.
2. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) Capitulation
An even sharper example of governance fragility occurred during the protests led by the “Cockroach Janta Party” (CJP). This student-led group formed in response to paper leaks in the NEET-UG exams and CBSE marking anomalies. The CJP ran a 36-day sit-in at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. The government ignored their peaceful protests for over a month.
However, after a clash near Parliament on July 20, which generated adverse international headlines, the administration folded within 24 hours. The state conceded all core demands, accepted the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and dropped all criminal cases against the protesters.
This sequence exposes a dangerous incentive structure. A peaceful protest is met with administrative silence, but a disruptive protest that threatens political optics yields immediate capitulation. It proves that the government’s threshold for engagement is public disorder, not rational argument.
This administrative inadequacy is mirrored in law enforcement. During the CJP protests, the Delhi Police utilized facial recognition technology to retroactively identify 2,500 individuals with criminal backgrounds moving through the protest site. While the state celebrated this forensic dragnet, it ignored the real question.
If the state possessed the technology to identify thousands of criminals in real-time, why did it fail to prevent the disorder in the first place? The security apparatus has become excellent at post-event forensic surveillance, but remains incapable of proactive prevention.
3. The Paradox of R.V.S. Mani’s Padma Shri
The relationship between the political executive and the permanent bureaucracy is further illuminated by the case of R.V.S. Mani. He is a former Under Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs. Mani claimed in 2009 that senior political leadership forced him to sign a false affidavit. This was to fabricate the “Saffron Terror” narrative in the Ishrat Jahan case. In 2018, he detailed this systemic pressure in a tell-all book.
Recently, the government awarded Mani the Padma Shri. The official citation explicitly credited him for handling sensitive national security cases with integrity. By putting the state’s official letterhead on this honor, the government effectively validated Mani’s claims of bureaucratic coercion and systemic conspiracy.
Yet, this honor reveals a profound paradox. While the state officially celebrates the whistleblower, it has taken zero systemic action to reform the administrative machinery or prosecute the officials who allegedly coerced him. The whistleblower is given a medal, but the machine that pressured him remains completely untouched. The Whistleblower Protection Act remains unimplemented even after 12 years of governance.
The Path Forward:
Modi’s project management model has worked electorally because the public has compared it to historic administrative paralysis. But as regional political alternatives weaken and memories of past regimes fade, the comparison will inevitably collapse into Modi vs. Modi. The law of diminishing returns will set in.
To sustain its global and domestic ambitions, India must transition from project management to systemic governance. This requires a concrete plan for institution building:
1. Dismantling the Generalist Administrative Cadre
The generalist IAS officer, carrying a colonial title (“Magistrate”) and protected by Article 311 tenure security, is structurally unfit for a complex 21st-century economy. India must replicate the Delhi Metro (DMRC) model across public sector undertakings and departments.
The DMRC succeeds not because of its train technology, but because of its administrative design. It was built entirely outside the generalist IAS cadre, hiring specialists directly on performance-linked contracts. Crucially, DMRC operates with a flat hierarchy, completely eliminating the colonial structure of peons, clerks, typists, and personal drivers that bloats standard government departments. Despite being India’s most successful public project, no other ministry or PSU has copied this lean staffing model. This exposes the bureaucracy’s refusal to dilute its own cadre control.
2. Reviving Lateral Entry
The cancellation of lateral entry reforms in August 2024 must be reversed. A modern state cannot run on the knowledge of a closed bureaucratic guild. The cabinet must institutionalize a transparent, permanent framework for bringing specialized private-sector talent into senior administrative roles. This should bypass the rigid IAS hierarchy.
3. Transitioning from Rhetoric to Falsifiable Commitments
State reform announcements must move away from outcome-based value statements. There is no point in saying that we “treat taxpayers as partners.” Do something concrete with falsifiable mechanisms. Simplicity must be coded into the law. For example: consolidating tax categories into a single-page form for anyone below the tax exemption limit, regardless of their asset classes.
4. Calibrating Watchdog Autonomy with Democratic Oversight
A common trap in institutional reform is demanding absolute, unchecked independence for watchdogs. In India, this has historically resulted in institutions becoming self-perpetuating sovereign guilds. Most notably, we see this in the judiciary, which through the collegium system has effectively become an unaccountable government unto itself, appointing its own members with zero democratic oversight.
Therefore, key accountability bodies must not be made “independent” in a way that turns them into parallel, sovereign empires. These are the Lokpal, the CBI, statistical agencies, and financial regulators. Instead, the goal must be functional autonomy balanced by strict democratic checks. This means removing unilateral executive control over appointments and investigations. At the same time, we must establish transparent legislative oversight, multi-party selection panels, mandatory public performance audits, and strict statutory boundaries. The state must possess a diagnostic layer that can speak truth to power without becoming a power center of its own.
There are 11 Chapters already written on Governance Crises in India. These chapters audit various institutions and are not repeated here for the sake of brevity. These can be accessed here.
Delimitation
Delimitation is overdue under the Constitution. Historically, constitution of new constituencies have always helped the ruling party. Congress winning in 2008 is the latest example. It ends ‘anti-incumbency.’ Cadre based parties like BJP is not that much affected if it mobilizes the cadre well in advance. Opposition is in disarray. They are dependent on sponsored ‘agitations’ mentioned above. After delimitation the seats in Parliament will increase by a whopping number to about 800 from current level of 500+. Finding candidates and resources to fight an election that big is not going to be easy.
Combine it with ‘One Nation One Election’ and reservation of 1/3rd seats for women in Parliament and delimitation becomes a tsunami.
Apart from Constitutional mandate, these reforms will definitely help BJP and Modi to get an extended one to two terms. It gives them an opportunity to start implementing these reforms in governance. They can do it if they choose to act in same manner as they did with GST, Article 370 and Naxalite eradication. If not it would be an opportunity lost.
Conclusion
Narendra Modi has proven that India can project power globally and build physical infrastructure locally. He has demonstrated the capacity of a brilliant project manager. But a nation of 1.4 billion cannot be run as a portfolio of projects from a single office in New Delhi. This dichotomy defines the modern Indian state.
Modi’s execution-heavy model has delivered visible successes, especially when you compare it to the sluggish, kickback-ridden administrations of the past. But it carries a structural vulnerability. By substituting project management for institutional building, the administration has bypassed the very reforms required to sustain India’s rise.
If India is to truly claim its place in the New World Order, it must transition from executing projects to building durable institutions.
Bharat must build the institutional foundation that allows governance to run itself, reliably and transparently, long after the project manager has moved on.
References:
- BSNL Protocol Leak Show Cause: https://indianpsu.com/bsnl-director-vivek-banjal-prayagraj-visit-cancelled-protocol-row/
- IAS Officer Sanjeev Khirwar Dog Walk Row & Reappointment: https://www.businesstoday.in/india/story/ias-officer-transferred-for-emptying-stadium-to-walk-his-dog-returns-as-delhis-new-mcd-commissioner-512257-2026-01-22
- Lokpal BMW Tender & Budget Controversy: https://the420.in/lokpal-bmw-controversy-broken-promise-anti-corruption-budget/
- Patnaik, Utsa. Revisiting the “Drain” (Documenting U.K.’s $45 trillion colonial extraction): ResearchGate link
- sandeepbhalla.in – The LPG Policy Blind Spot in India
- sandeepbhalla.in – Is India in Governance Crises?
- SC judge flags lack of transparency in judicial appointments
- Supreme Court judge questions Collegium for opacity
- By Not Giving Reasons, Collegium Doing Disservice To Judges: Justice Bhuyan!