The economic mind of Narendra Modi
1 October 2019
HINDOL SENGUPTA
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has always sought a methodology to create economic policy that goes beyond the communism-capitalism binary. While the BJP is assumed to be more free-market-friendly than its main rival, the Indian National Congress (INC), it is also true that the BJP government has usually greenlighted significant government expenditure in areas like infrastructure. The current BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is building a model that marries some of the largest and most expensive government programmes ever rolled out in the history of independent India to deliver goods and services, with a simultaneous push to trigger mass entrepreneurship by introducing reforms such as major tax cuts. This brief examines the task for the BJP government.