Most of the passengers in the ill-fated train were returning from Ayodhya after the kar seva at the Ram Janmabhoomi site.

The Godhra incident led to a flash of communal riots in Gujarat and in other parts of India. These riots brought tremendous pressure on the then Gujarat chief minister (CM), Narendra Modi and his key minister, Amit Shah.

Both Modi and Shah spent several years with accusations of direct involvement in Gujarat riots. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government conducted a strict judicial process against both. Neither of them was implicated in any case.

Meanwhile, Modi scripted a dream comeback for Gujarat in his 13-year CM stint, leading the state towards industrialisation and administrative reforms.

The taint of 2002 did not stick, overruled by his work as the CM and he eventually rose to become India’s Prime Minister (PM) in 2014. Amit Shah has led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as president since 2014 and now serves as India’s Home Minister.

Roads Revolution — Mumbai-Pune Expressway Launch (April 2002)

At the turn of the last century, India had started focusing on creating a good quality inter-state and inter-city road infrastructure. The Vajpayee government had planned the Golden Quadrilateral, which was launched in 1999.

The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana was launched in 2000 with an ambition to connect all Indian villages with an all-weather road. This was India’s own “New Deal”.

The first differentiating realisation of this road infrastructure focus, however, came from the state of Maharashtra. The Mumbai-Pune Expressway was inaugurated in April 2002, after trials started in 2000.

This 95-kilometre, six-lane expressway still supports the connectivity and commerce between India’s largest and eighth-largest city economies.

Planned through the 1990s, the expressway construction started under the chief ministership of Manohar Joshi with Nitin Gadkari at the helm of the Public Works Department.

The Golden Quadrilateral took another decade to complete, linking the five big metros of India — Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata.

In the last two decades, government capital expenditure on roads has become a closely tracked item, serving as a proxy of Indian economic health.

Metro Rail Revolution — Delhi Launch (December 2002)

Most of the large cities in the world have had metro rail networks for the better part of the last 100 years.

Indian cities had faced permanent and perennial infrastructure deficit since Independence. Mass rapid transportation had been the biggest casualty, with almost no big investments in new means.

Delhi led the way with the launch of an ambitious metro rail programme in 1998. The first section — Shahdara to Tees Hazari — opened on 24 December 2002 with a Red Line label.

The central governments under Vajpayee and later Manmohan Singh kept the focus on the Delhi Metro, along with great local political leadership by the then Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit.

The Delhi Metro System has now grown to 391 kilometres, with 285 stations, being served by 310 trains and a daily ridership of 6 million.

Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, who served as the managing director of Delhi Metro from 1995 to 2012, truly emerged as the ‘Metro Man’ of India.

India today has 13 operational metro systems covering 18 cities. New cities are getting added on the metro map rapidly and existing metros are seeing expansion.

Private players are now exporting metro coaches globally from local facilities — an unimaginable thought at the turn of this century.

Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore’s Silver Medal At Athens Olympics (August 2004)

India has never had a great record at the Olympics, barring the medals won in hockey. It was only in 2004 that India won its first-ever individual silver medal at the Olympics.

Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won a silver medal at the Athens game in the double trap event of the shooting discipline. Rathore had earlier won a gold medal at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, which had propelled him to national fame.

Rathore, who retired as a Colonel in the Indian Army, was awarded the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award for 2004-05 and a Padma Shri in 2005. He was also the flag-bearer for the Indian contingent in the 2006 Commonwealth Games and the 2008 Olympics.

After Rathore’s accomplishment, India has seen a steady rise in Olympics performance. In 2008, Abhinav Bindra won a gold. In 2012, Vijay Kumar and Sushil Kumar won silver medals. In 2016, P V Sindhu won a silver medal.

TCS Public Listing (August 2004)

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been India’s premier technology services firm since its inception in 1968. Leading India’s information technology (IT) enabled services revolution, TCS is now a major global player in the business.

While Indian technology firms had been raising capital in the past, TCS getting publicly listed was a big event, given its market leadership. The stock was listed on exchanges on 25 August 2004.

The first 10 years of TCS stock trading resulted in 27 per cent compounded annualised returns. In June 2019, TCS crossed IBM on market capitalisation. This was significant as IBM was the undisputed sector leader when TCS was founded in 1968.

However, with the ups and downs of Indian rupees, TCS’ market capitalisation has not constantly stayed over that of IBM.

However, the TCS listing heralded a new era on Indian stock markets, where a home-grown new-economy firm took on the best of the world and outshone them by its financial and operational performance.

Global wealth creation by an Indian firm was a great inflection point in building business confidence and self-assurance.

Ballistic Missile Defence Programme (November 2006)

During and in the aftermath of the Kargil War in 1999 with Pakistan two things came to fore — a nuclear threat from Pakistan escalated and limitations of India acquiring the latest weapons from other countries got exposed.

It was then that India started focusing on the development of its own ballistic missiles.

The programme focused on developing sea and land-based interceptor missiles. India started working on a two-tier interception programme for high and low altitudes. The Prithvi Air Defence (PAD) catered to the former and the Advanced Air Defence (AAD) to the latter objective.

The PAD Exercise (PADE) was conducted in November 2006, where the system intercepted a Prithvi-II missile at an altitude of 50 km.

This programme has moved from strength to strength since. The March 2019 Ant-Satellite Missile Test (ASAT) was the logical progression of the ballistic missile defence programme.

The Indian Premier League Launch (April 2008)

India has always been a big cricket economy. But the advent of T20 cricket took the commercialisation of the sport and the monetary benefits accruing to the system, including hitherto fringe players, to another level.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) was launched in April 2008 by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) as a response to splinter leagues challenging the hegemony of the BCCI in managing cricket in the country.

The cash-rich eight-team T20 league created its own window in the international cricket calendar. Several lesser-known players, who could not make it to the national team, played shoulder to shoulder with the biggest names in cricket for two months in India.

Twelve editions later the IPL is still going strong. Several state-level cricket leagues have also cropped up since then. The concept has been replicated to football, hockey, badminton, tennis, table tennis and kabaddi since then.

IPL has become the new home ground for talent hunting. Many Indian sportspersons across sports have become more financially secure with the leagues catching on.

Chandrayaan-1 Launch (October 2008)

With an intent to boost India’s space programme and to leapfrog the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as a global giant, Prime Minister Vajpayee announced India’s mission to the moon on Independence Day 2003.

The programme development continued with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh taking over in May 2004.

ISRO spent Rs 386 crore to develop a lunar probe named Chandrayaan-1. The National Lunar Task Force had already been working since 2000 to develop technology capability on India approaching the moon.

The probe was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre using ISRO’s four-stage PSLV C11 launch platform.

On 12 November 2008, the probe entered the lunar orbit 100 km above the lunar surface. The probe operated until 28 August 2009 — a total of 312 days as against the originally planned two-year timeframe.

The terrain mapping camera of the probe sent back 70,000 three-dimensional images of the moon during this period. The mission also led to the lunar water and lunar caves discovery.

Chandrayaan-1 was the first step in India’s plan to send a manned mission to the moon. The programme made India a serious player in the space research field.

Mumbai Attacks (November 2008)

Ten Pakistani terrorists equipped with arms and ammunition and a jihadi brain strolled into Mumbai and brought the city to its knees, chatting with their handlers in Pakistan for several hours.

Around 166 lives were lost. Five-star hotels, a busy railway station, chic cafes and a Jewish prayer centre were targeted. It was one of the most audacious terror attacks anywhere in the world.