Key Takeaways (AI Overview Summary):
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12-year tenure (4,399+ consecutive days) represents one of the longest continuous leadership eras in modern Indian history.
- Key achievements include expansion of infrastructure, rapid scaling of Digital Public Infrastructure (UPI, DBT), and raising foreign exchange reserves to ~$700 billion by June 2026.
- Strategic foreign diplomacy balanced relationships with major global powers while asserting India's role as a leading voice for the Global South.
- Ongoing challenges include addressing youth unemployment, climate impacts on agriculture, and managing domestic socio-political developments.
By Ramesh Sundaram (Joint Managing Editor) & Dr Sarika Takhar (Editorial Team Member)
Published in PreSense Edition 232 (June 2026)
The milestone: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure for 4,399+ consecutive days is not just a political statistic. It is an amazing story of a person who rose from a grassroots-level party worker to the post of Prime Minister of India. His rise from Gujarat Chief Minister to arguably India’s most able Prime Minister is a heady mix of high ambition, political branding, and controversies. It is astonishing to know that an entire generation is growing up under a single Prime Minister, the defining face of Narendra Modi. For a 15-year-old Indian in 2026, the concept of a Prime Minister has only one voice and one look – Narendra Modi.
Let us chronologically discuss his era:
Narendra Modi as Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014. His long reign was marked by excellent crisis management after the disastrous earthquake in Bhuj. He emphasised on infrastructure, power supply, and industrial development, and his style of development politics became the central point in his rise in national politics.
The Pillars of the ‘Gujarat Model’: Modi, during his tenure as CM, did a massive bureaucratic overhaul by upending traditional file-pushing culture, demanding strict accountability and directly monitoring execution of projects through a centralised system. His infrastructure and energy initiatives like Jyotigram Yojana radically transformed the State’s rural landscape by separating agricultural power lines from domestic lines, thereby delivering near-uninterrupted 24/7 electricity to villages – a rare feat in India at that time. He made the State investment-friendly by launching the biennial Vibrant Gujarat Global Investor Summit, he bypassed red tape through a single-window clearance system that attracted billions of domestic and foreign investments. This made Gujarat, India’s premier manufacturing powerhouse.
Narendra Modi’s Tenure as Prime Minister
This made the BJP project Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate in the 2014 general elections. The rest is history. The BJP won the elections, and Narendra Damodaradas Modi became the Prime Minister. Ironically, a maverick leader who styled himself as a disruptive anti-establishment rebel became India’s ultimate political establishment icon!
Key developmental indicators comparing 2014 and 2026 during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tenure
The Calculus of Continuity
The Creative Angle: The Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought about many changes that tallied with a changing landscape. His penchant for the digital transformation of India has borne fruit. Many politicians had been sceptical of PM Modi’s digital propagation. They believed that this digital transformation would not reach the common man, who, they thought, might not be able to grasp this change. But all were proved wrong.
President Pranab Mukherjee administering the oath of office to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014
The Digital Leap: Modi aggressively supported Unified Payments Interface (UPI). There were doubts whether the UPI would percolate to the lower strata of the population. But the common man understood the procedure and has been doing digital transactions in every walk of life; An elderly woman using a biometric thumbprint to buy grain in a remote village, a young urban lad in Bengaluru paying for chai via a quick QR code scan, and a street cart vendor receiving UPI payments from his customers are some shining examples. India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) transformed the mobile phone from a luxury into a financial passport. By bypassing middlemen via Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT), the Government engineered a quiet economic revolution by digitally transferring cash benefits directly to beneficiaries’ bank accounts. His major policy shifts included the effective implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, along with the above-mentioned Direct Benefits Transfers. His master stroke of Demonetisation, though it initially caused inconvenience to the common man, put paid to the evil designs of printing and circulating counterfeit notes from across the border.
The "Welfare-State" Revolution: Going past dry numbers, let us talk about Modi’s aspirational India. His humane victory lies in the massive, quiet transition of moving nearly 250 million people out of multidimensional poverty. It is the story of shifting from basic survival to relative stability through structural safety—free rations for 80 crore citizens, sanitation drives, houses for all and piped water for all villages.
Foreign Affairs: India evolved from a cautious global observer to an assertive "Vishwa Mitra" (friend of the world) or global swing power. Whether balancing ties during the Ukraine crisis or championing the Global South, the narrative under Modi transitioned from India wanting a seat at the table to India helping set the menu. Modi’s foreign tours were mostly fruitful, leading to many useful tie-ups and investments. His deft handling of the two Super Powers – USA and Russia is commendable. He continued to purchase oil from Russia despite the threat of sanctions from USA. While continuing to import oil from Russia, he also made sure that the delicate relationship with USA is not affected. This, to a great extent, reduced the impact of the oil crisis due to the ongoing West Asia War. While the other neighbouring countries found it tough to procure oil, leading to a phenomenal increase in fossil fuel prices, in India, the hike in oil prices was minimal, mainly due to astute foreign diplomacy. This can be adduced by comparing fuel prices in neighbouring countries.
Health: Managing the Coronavirus epidemic: His astute thinking during the killer Coronavirus epidemic went a long way in reducing the Coronavirus-related deaths. Coronavirus vaccinations developed indigenously at short notice proved to be effective in preventing the spread of the Coronavirus. These vaccinations were provided free to all people. Not only that, India exported the vaccines to many countries that were either facing a vaccination shortage or were unable to buy high-cost vaccines from the West.
President Droupadi Murmu administering the oath of office to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2024 (third consecutive term as PM)
Modi presented himself as a decisive problem-solver with a nationalistic vision. His effective communication style, disciplined public image, and effective branding projected him as the strongest Prime Minister. Under his regime, the Indian economy grew exponentially, catapulting it to the third-largest economy in the world at roughly $4.15 Trillion in 2026. India is also one of the fastest-growing economies. India’s Foreign Exchange Reserve is USD is around 700 Billion in the week ended June 26, 2026.
The Challenges & Structural Fault Lines
Fast Economic Growth and Unemployment: The grand vision of a 5-trillion-dollar economy is currently facing a deeply human crisis at home: unemployment and severe underemployment. It is the story of highly educated youth scrambling for low-tier gig work or temporary contract jobs. The demographic dividend feels dangerously close to becoming a demographic liability. Despite high-profile initiatives like the PM Kisan Nidhi, the rural-urban economic divide remains stark. Talk about the psychological weight on the Indian farmer—battling volatile climate patterns, rising input costs, and a market structure that often leaves them empty-handed. There are also criticisms regarding the alleged tightening grip on independent media and civil society, as well as the aggressive use of federal investigative agencies against political opponents. But these remain allegations only as there was no corroborative evidence.
The 2002 Gujarat riots continue to haunt Modi, though official investigations did not find sufficient evidence to charge him and absolved him of any wrongdoing. That controversy never fully disappeared; instead, it became part of the national debate over whether his politics prioritised development over inclusiveness.
There is also a central question: Is economic efficiency arriving at the cost of institutional elasticity?
Under Modi, the older, secular "Idea of India" was decisively replaced by an assertive, unapologetic majoritarian identity. For his supporters, this is a historic decolonial reawakening—a reclamation of civilizational pride symbolised by projects like the Ram Mandir, while his critics and the country’s vast minority populations accuse Modi of alienating a majoritarian drift that threatens the delicate fabric of India's pluralism. We cannot deny the fact that he has created “My India” patriotism across the nation. But the electoral results show that the majority of the population believes in him and his actions. He remains the undisputed leader for the third term now in India and also to the world.
Conclusion: The Verdict of Time
The Metaphor: Modi's 12-year governance can be compared to a high-speed bullet train. It may be fast, awe-inspiringly modern, and structurally uncompromising, but it leaves some people standing bewildered at the older stations, wondering if there is room for them on board. But the Modi express chugs on merrily, making India a vibrant economy.
History’s final judgment on the Modi era won't be calculated solely by the length of his stay in New Delhi, but whether the massive state machinery he built left the average Indian fundamentally freer, safer, and more prosperous.
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