The third red flag I want to raise on this third anniversary is that there are no signs yet of the economic boom that people like me believed would happen as soon as Modi became Prime Minister. The third red flag I want to raise on this third anniversary is that there are no signs yet of the economic boom that people like me believed would happen as soon as Modi became Prime Minister.

There has been such a deluge of gratuitous scrutiny of Narendra Modi’s performance as he passes the anniversary of his third year in office that you are probably sick of reading report cards. I am. Sadly it is as impossible for a political columnist to ignore this third anniversary as it would be for a film critic to avoid reviewing Baahubali 2. But, I am going to spice things up by highlighting three serious failures instead of subjecting you to another tedious omnibus analysis.

There have been in my humble opinion serious failures in three areas. Of these, I believe the absence of a new education policy is the biggest failure of all. The higher education system Modi inherited was a mess created by regulators who have used their immense powers to create a licence raj. It will not be easy to rid Indian education of the University Grants Commission (UGC) or the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), or the other regulators that hide behind other acronyms, but it has to be done.

Only when universities and colleges are given the right to decide their own courses and rules will we see real change. Instead of doing this, Modi’s first HRD Minister spent her time trying to destroy the vice-chancellor of Delhi University for reasons unknown. Dinesh Singh was among the handful of academics who had shown initiative in bleak realms of academia, made bleaker by regulation. The Prime Minister got rid of Smriti Irani but the man who replaced her has shown no taste for ‘parivartan’ so it has not happened. And young Indians, who cannot afford a foreign education, continue to face soul-destroying competition to get into mediocre colleges. The problem is huge. Between Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and the CBSE, 60 lakh new students seek college admission every year. Delhi University admits only 60,000 students a year from all over the country.

The second major failure, in my view, has been in urbanisation. By 2050, half of India’s population will be living in towns or cities that will look like shanties built on garbage mountains, unless urgent action is taken now. Most Indian cities and towns already resemble wastelands because nobody has bothered to plan them properly since 1947, and nobody appears to have understood yet that waste management needs professional expertise.

It is a fine idea to think of ‘smart’ cities but dear Prime Minister please wander around Gorakhpur by car or on foot (as I did last week) and you will realise why this cesspool of a town breeds Japanese Encephalitis that kills thousands of children every year. More than 80 per cent of the diseases that Indian children die of before they reach the age of five are caused by filthy living conditions and contaminated drinking water. Swachh Bharat is impossible without ‘swastha’ Bharat.

The third red flag I want to raise on this third anniversary is that there are no signs yet of the economic boom that people like me believed would happen as soon as Modi became Prime Minister. Candidate Modi had mocked at poverty redistribution schemes like MNREGA and said clearly that India should work for prosperity and not just hope to alleviate poverty. But, somewhere along the way he seems to have changed his mind and become a Nehruvian socialist. He appears to have decided that there is no harm in the Government of India hanging onto its public sector companies despite them being bottomless pits.

So although the Government of India could become flush with funds by selling off useless airlines and hotels, this has not happened. Nor has there been any attempt at making commercial use of the enormous tracts of urban land that the Ministries of Defence and Railways sit on. We have so far seen no signs either of the government cutting spending on itself by reducing the size of its offices and reducing the privileges of its officers. The result is that an atmosphere of stale socialism continues to permeate huge sections of the economy. And with the hunt for black money having been speeded up, some of the most corrupt officials in India now have more power than ever before.

This is not the kind of atmosphere in which an economic boom becomes possible. So alas, there is no sign yet of those joyous times that we witnessed in the wake of the end of the licence raj when it really did seem for a while as if India would finally make it to being at least a middle-income country. Having just returned from eastern Uttar Pradesh I feel it my duty as a patriotic Indian to report that it looks as bad as it always has. The only sign of modernity is that cellphones have reached everywhere as has television, and they seem incompatible with the squalor all around.

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