Narendra Modi's sweeping victory in the May 2014 Indian general election prompted jubilation among his Hindu supporters in Varanasi, the northern city on the Ganges he had chosen as his parliamentary seat.

The energetic leader of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata party seemed to usher in a radical change from the sclerotic Congress government he had deposed, promising jobs for the young, toilets for the poor and economic reforms for investors and entrepreneurs.

Two years on, and even Mr Modi's supporters in Uttar Pradesh, the country's most populous state, are beginning to wonder if the prime minister will be able to achieve half of what he has pledged — whether the target is a clean-up of the polluted Gangesor the revival of Indian manufacturing.

"Modi's a realist," says one retired banker in Varanasi, "but he hasn't achieved anything yet. People say he needs more time."

Higher up the Ganges in Kanpur, the industrial city once known as the Manchester of India, business leaders say the erratic supply of electricity has improved slightly. But there are few new jobs for the 1m or so young Indians who enter the workforce each month: lack of power, the difficulty of acquiring land, restrictive labour laws and constant interference by bureaucratic and corrupt government inspectors have made sure of that.

"Definitely his vision is perfectly OK," I.M. Rohatgi, who runs an education business and heads the Merchants' Chamber of Uttar Pradesh, says of Mr Modi. "But the implementation is taking time."

Before he took office, Mr Modi's liberal enemies feared he would become a powerful, authoritarian prime minister who would impose or allow his religious backers to impose fundamentalist Hinduism on India's heterogeneous population.

There has been some of that. One Muslim businessman in Kanpur said he was worried about "intolerance" following the lynching of a man in Uttar Pradesh on suspicion that he had eaten beef (cows are holy to Hindus).