Checkout Budget Highlights 2023The toilets, bank accounts and water connections his government has provided people since first coming to power in 2014 will win Prime Minister Narendra Modi a third term in 2024, says Arvind Panagariya, former vice chairman of the policy think tank Niti Aayog.
Panagariya, an Indian-American economist and the Jagdish Bhagwati professor of Indian political economy at Columbia University, also forecast that India would leapfrog from the fifth to the third largest economy this decade.
Panagariya was one of the first to predict the Modi government’s victory by a majority in the 2019 general election.
In an exclusive conversation with Moneycontrol on his visit to India, he recounted that he wrote an article for an English daily that predicted the win in 2019, hours after which he met the prime minister.
Panagariya was assured then that the victory could be even bigger than what had been forecast by the economist.
Four years on, Panagariya, who is one of the world’s foremost political economists, says the Modi government will repeat its 2019 win next year.
“The factors that worked for the Modi government remain valid even today. The first is the Prime Minister himself; instead of an anti-incumbency, his popularity has only grown. Today the opposition looks even more fragmented,” he said in the interview.
“The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) has expanded its footprint. In 2014, the BJP had zero footprint in the Northeast. And I am a firm believer that governments which deliver come back. Look at (Odisha Chief Minister) Mr Naveen Patnaik. He is Mr Teflon where anti-incumbency is concerned.”
What has worked for the Modi government
The government has announced a slew of schemes targeted at those at the bottom of the pyramid. Panagariya said Swacch Bharat has been a crucial driver of change.
“I was watching the Prime Minister’s speech on television when Mr Modi announced this scheme - I was almost stunned, I was wondering how he will do it? But he has done it,” said Panagariya.
The Swacch Bharat Mission was announced in 2014. According to government data, 6.281 million toilets have been constructed across households along with over 600,000 community toilets. Some 4,355 cities have been declared free of open defecation.
JAM trinity has been another gamechanger--opening of bank accounts in the context of a billion phones became a very powerful instrument in making transfers and reducing corruption, Panagariya said.
The core components of JAM are basic savings bank accounts opened under the Jan Dhan Yojana, the Aadhaar unique identity number and the mobile phone.
Around 480 million bank accounts have been opened under Jan Dhan Yojana.
A third policy intervention has been the Nal Se Jal scheme, aimed at providing a potable water connection to every household by 2024. The government has allocated about Rs. 3.60 lakh crore for the programme. According to government data, over 30 million rural households already have functional tap water connections and the government is targeting covering the remaining households by 2024.
According to Panagariya, these schemes directly benefit women, who have been increasingly coming out to vote, and also determining how their household votes.
You can catch the full interview here