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  Th full push for industrialization and modernization happened under BJP party's Modi in Gujarat state when Manmohan Singh was PM from Congress party, with Modi's model adopted by the whole nation when Modi became PM in 2014. In 1947 India gained independence but remained a poor undeveloped country with a large population of 340 million lacking the funds for rapid economic development. It had experimented with elections in the 1930's setting up state assemblies under British rule. This continued under Jawaharlal Nehru of the Congress party but development stagnated under his successors Indira Gandhi and Rajmohan Gandhi his daughter and grandson. In 2000 the opposition party under Vajpayee assumed office and made the shift to a market economy.  Manmohan Singh, economist and head of the Indian central bank, finance minister gave India a period of transition after the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Bharatiya Janata party full term in office 1999-2004. He introduced economic change through the unwinding of the socialist economy under Jawaharlal Nehru, a nuclear agreement with the US allowing access to nuclear technology, yet failed to tackle a central issue in the way India was governed with leakage of funds for development through corrupt politicians slowing the pace of investment and industrial revolution in India.    ...

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This NYT article on India's Olympics preparations focuses on Neeraj Chopra, in javelin. In actual fact the Indian Olympics efforts is now supported by the government of prime minister Modi with his personal involvement at many levels. Funding is now provided by the government to athletes on a scale and in ways that never happened before. India;s Olympics athletes batch was personally invited to the prime minister's residence and Modi gave apep talk to the athletes including some useful advice from him and from seniro Olympians. One of the pieces of advice from Modi was to concentrate on the task at hand and not get distracted by the many things happening in Paris and the excitement of being at the first Olympics. Modi has also told athletes as he has for India's Space program to the Moon that a loss or a failure to achieve on the first try means you only try harder and learn the discipline required to achieve what you set out to do.

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Before the first lockdown in March 2020 for the pandemic prime minister Modi stated in his nationwide address that the choice was to take action now or for India to go back 21 years. Following the lockdowns and as India prepares for the largest vaccination program in the world for 1.3 billion people, the Indian economy is on the road to recovery. Here Mr. Rajnath Singh, a senior minister in the administration says the Indian economy will return to pre-covid levels by the end of this fiscal year, in a sharp reversal from previous forecasts.

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Countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal are severely affected by the war in Persian Gulf region in other ways that access to oil and fertilizer supplies. They are affected when the Gulf economy collapses and expatriate workers are laid off or return. The situation is dire in these countties because as the DW.com says remittances exceed exports in the case of Pakistan. Is such a model viable asks DW.com. All these countries are also affected by internal strife, with new governments in place in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka after protests over economic conditions and jobs. The entire Middle East model for Gulf countries including Saudi, Iran are also facing a new situation as the Western countries, US and EU and Asia shift to nuclear energy, solar energy and find ways to conserve at an accelerated pace so that there will be less dependence on fossil fuels. Recently India announced on its national television channel that one third of peak demand is already being met by solar energy. India's PM Modi says in rallies across the country that he would make it possible for households to have zero electric bills because of solar panels on homes. Germany and Japan are further along on this path to create a renewable energy reliance and phasing out fossil fuels. ...

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Ellen Barry's interview with Yogi Nagendra in which Nagendra talks about meditation yoga and how it is practiced in India. Nagendra has known prime minister Modi since 1984 and has provided 4 yoga meetings to Mr. Modi and his ministers in Gujarat when he was Chief Minister of the state, till today as prime minister. This Yoga concentrates on meditation and tries to calm the mind as described in the Kena Upanishad (the classics of the Indian philosophy of Vedanta which form the basis of Yoga).

"The eye does not go there, nor speech, nor the mind. It is different from what is known, and what is unknown."

It is through constant and repeated practice that this meditation yoga can through concentration and yearning help one to reach a level of calmness that is a form of samadhi. Samadhi produces a level of calm and serenity mostly unknown to man.

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British prime minister Boris Johnson will visit India in January at the invitation of Indian prime minister Modi. It is the first bilateral visit of Mr. Johnson since taking office. Johnson says he really looks forward to the trip and delivering on the quantum leap to create jobs and growth for the two countries. He has invited Modi to the G7 Summit in London as a guest nation along with Australia and South Korea. Mr. Johnson will also host a climate change summit. This is the first visit to India by a British prime minister since John Major. Because of the historical relationship and the British Commonwealth of nations, and as leaders in the English speaking world, both countries have a lot in common. The parliamentary system India adopted comes from Britain. India's role in the Indian ocean as a maritime power alongside Britain and Australia also comes from the period when Britain was the preeminent maritime power in the world. Indian companies in UK have $41 billion pounds in sales and half a million British jobs come from Indian companies. India also is UK's biggest partner in pharmaceuticals, making 50% of the world's vaccines. ...

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Indian prime minister Mod's address at the COP26 Glasgow in DW.com video, announcing India's 5 commitments and determination to deliver on them, including Net Zero Emissions by 2070. India set tangible targets for 2030-

500 gigawatts of renewable energy, 1 billon tons fewer emissions, 45% improvement in carbon intensity, 50% for renewables in energy mix.

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S. Jaishankar, Indian Foreign Minister speaks at the University of Delhi on his chapter in the new book Modi@20 Dreams meet Delivery. He also discusses the war in Ukraine, the Indian view on people and shortages created by the war of energy and food, and India's approach to Pakistan and China.

 

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Indian prime minister Modi attends the 125th anniversary of Founders Day at the Scindia School of Gwalior. India's Minister of Civil Aviation and Steel comes from the royal family of Gwalior which ran the princely state as part of the British Empire and founded the school. It is the most reputed boarding school for boys in India.

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This report in the WSJ shows Cubans lacking water for washing, sanitation, and having electricity blackouts or electricity for only 4 hours a day. Cuba lacks money to buy oil. The economy has long been shown to be frozen in the past without the technological change seen in other countries in the developing world. It shows the only model that works is one of good governance, access to US and European capital and technology for modernization, close relations with the US, building domestic knowledge base and engineers for  modernization, as sine qua non essental conditions in the Modern World since 1950. China and India tried under Mao and Nehru under socialist regimes but failed. The Monroe Doctrine is not for the US, it is an essential pre condition for countries in the western hemisphere on which the other essential conditions are laid to create modern societies. China and India with the essential conditions achieving modernization under Modi and Deng and his successors. It is true that Cuban dictator Batista's regime was a bad one in the 1950's, yet the answer is not to put in its place or as a reaction to this an idealistic version which like human nature is prone to corruption and decline, but build on sound and firm ground foundations tsuch as these essential conditions and sine qua non that stand the test of time and are good for the American continent. ...

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This WSJ editorial welcomes the change in India in the form of Modi bringing his executive experience in Gujarat state to the national level. It also points out the risks of Modi following a simple model of state capitalism pursued by China which also has political controls, and of the form in Brazil which invites crony capitalism and limited results. Better says the WSJ to take a new approach to satisfy the growing aspirations of young people who overwhelmingly supported Modi in the hope of better access to jobs and improved standards of living.

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DY Chandrachud and his father CY Chandrachud will soon be the first father son combination of Supreme Court Chief Justices in Indian history. This has not happened in Britain or US. CY Chandrachud was Chief Justice of the SupremeCourt of India from 1978 to 1985. DY Chandrachud was part of a three member bench of the Indian Supreme Court that looked at The Modi government vaccination policy in April 2021 and gave a ruling that formed the basis of Mr. Modi's action for a new and broader vaccination policy that ensured access to the entire Indian population of 1.2 billion people.

This report in The Times of India describes the son's record following in the footsteps of his father. DY Chandrachud studied at St Stephens College Delhi, Delhi University Law, and Harvard for his Masters degree in Law. His experience includes heading the Uttar Pradesh High Court in Allahabad and holding legal positions in Mumbai.

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New targets are reviewed for malnutrition and under nutrition in India by prime minister Modi for the year 2022, the 75th year of Indian independence. Current status and nutrition initiatives were discussed and new targets set for the whole country, region by region. Real time monitoring will be conducted. Greater awareness is needed for this problem in India to get better results.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi sends message to the BIMSTEC summit as it meets in in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar is visiting Sri Lanka for the summit of Bay of Bengal Initiative countries. Modi calls for greater cooperation and free trade agreements to bring these countries together- Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, India.

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In his speech to the Indian  parliament following the Motion of Thanks for the President's address Mr. Modi points to gains in infrastructure, in addressing the pandemic, building India's new role  in the world's supply chain,  Gati Shakti Master plan for development. He says this was a way to make Gandhi's dreams for India to come true by the 100th year of India's independence in 2047.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi gives his radio broadcast Mann Ki Baat -Conversation from My Mind- for June 2024, returning from the months long general election. The arrival of the monsoon rains gives Modi an opportunity to showcase umbrellas made by small industry in Kerala, on the southeast coastline of India. To showcase Indian products is a regular aspect of the radio show. Here Modi shows that snow peas from Pulwama, Kashmir are now going to London, England. Araku coffee gives employment to 150,000 tribal people in Andhra Pradesh. It is becoming known in Europe. Modi extols the images of hundreds of thousands of people doing yoga near the Nile river and on the Red Sea coastline in Egypt, and Yoga day sessions in Kashmir and in Saudi Arabia. International Yoga Day was an opportunity to do yoga in Srinagar, Kashmir.

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This editorial in the Economist points to the slow progress made in the first year of the Modi administration in India. Because the last years of the previous Manmohan Singh administration were a period of slowing economic growth and the built up expectations are high, there is a general sense that the Modi administration could have moved faster to make changes. As the Economist points out India is a large region with accumulated problems, and the Modi administration needs to have a good grip on the problems and how it plans to tackle them. Key bottlenecks such as energy will free up huge resources in the economy. How to tackle these individual problems with the most leverage for growth is critical to the approach to be taken, as all of the problems cannot be tackled at once. Coal India is an example of the government trying to find an approach that will work, following previous wholly unsuccessful efforts to overhaul the monopoly coal supplier. Modi also has to work within the framework of democracy, so the Indian experiment in change is likely to involve freeing up other energies for rapid development, unlike the Chinese experiment which was able to use the Communist party's total control of the country and top down direction. Under such a framework Modi will have to improvise and come up with a different framework for making rapid changes, that includes keeping the support of the farmers and working classes for a sustained 10 year effort. Moves such as the 150 million new bank accounts and the structure of providing relief to the poor in rural areas come from a good sensible approach, but also help the Modi administration completely change the way things are done, a cultural change which removes the old culture of support developed by Congress administrations since 1947. A similiar cultural approach is seen in the Clean India campaign, which is huge in cultural terms because in a democracy people have to change the way they think to keep their neighborhoods clean. In this sense the Modi administration as it studies and grapples with the problems to plan effective solutions to seemingly intractable problems in a vast region, is simply laying a strong groundwork for 2016-2018. Steps taken for the groundwork covered separately in the Economist report on India in the issue of May 23, 2016, are the efforts to get a goods and services tax implemented to improve the federal government's revenues, the shift of revenues so that about 62% of revenue goes to the states to promote development- which economic advisor, Arvind Subramanium, calls a big constructive change as states are better at competing for talent capital and investment, and the setting up of the think tank to replace the Soviet style Planning Commission of the Congress administrations since 1947....

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Prime minister Modi says India is achieving its aggressive climate change goals and has set the goal of 450 gigawatts from renewable energy by 2030. Solar energy will play a key role. A new Green Hydrogen Mission will be set up for a quantum leap in hydrogen. 

Indian railways will be a zero carbon emitter by 2030. Indian Railways is moving forward to achieve 100% electrification. CNG, PNG networks will span the whole country. 

He said India imports 1.2 trillion rupees of fossil fuels. Renewable energy will reduce this import bill and release resources for other vital investments for India's rapid modernization goals.

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The prime minister says he finds a deep sense of peace listening to the kirtan during the prayers on the occasion of the 400th anniversary for Guru Tegh Bahadur. Guru Tegh Bahadur is one of the forgotten heroes and saints of the Punjab for his discourses in many languages throughout the length and breadth of India seeing a whole nation in many communities, and for his meditation that stretches back in time to the days of the Buddha in India.

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Interaction with students during Modi's visit to Kerala as he opens the Kochi Water Metro and the first high speed train in Kerala. The train will cover major parts of the state including Thiruvanathapuram, Kottayam, Ernakulam, Kozhikode, Kannur, and Kasargod.