Modi hails India's growth story, sets 10-year deadline to shed colonial mindset

Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on its 23rd edition and offered a portrait of India as an outlier in a world of economic drift. While global growth sits at 3 percent and the Group of Seven economies hover near 1.5 percent, India is expanding at a markedly faster clip while keeping inflation in check. This is not merely a statistical advantage, Modi argued—it represents a fundamental reorientation of how the country thinks about itself and its place in the world.

The backdrop matters. The world has absorbed financial crises, a global pandemic, and now moves through a landscape of persistent uncertainty. In this climate, Modi positioned India differently: not as a nation bracing for slowdown, but as one writing stories of growth. When trust erodes elsewhere, he suggested, India becomes a pillar of it. The framing was deliberate—a shift in how India sees itself, and how it wants to be seen.

Much of this transformation, Modi contended, flows from a decade of systemic change. Reforms are no longer reactive measures deployed to manage crisis or score political points. They have become structural, embedded across sectors. The intent, he said, is nation first. Evidence appeared in specific places: villages and smaller cities now access cutting-edge technology. Smaller urban centers have become hubs for micro, small, and medium enterprises. Farmers in rural areas connect to global markets. Indian women are establishing themselves on the world stage.

But Modi also named something deeper—a psychological shift. India is still, 79 years after independence, working to free itself from a colonial mindset. He pointed to concrete examples of how this mentality had calcified into bureaucratic practice. Citizens once needed government officials to attest their own documents. His government removed that requirement; a citizen's self-attested document now suffices. The change sounds procedural. Modi treated it as philosophical—a statement about whether the state trusts its own people.

This trust question extended to unclaimed money. Banks across the country hold 78,000 crore rupees belonging to citizens but sitting dormant, owners unknown. Insurance companies hold 14,000 crore rupees. Dividend accounts contain 9,000 crore rupees. All of it unclaimed, all of it a kind of evidence. Modi's government has held camps in around 500 districts to identify rightful owners and return their money. He framed this not as asset recovery but as restoration of trust—a practical demonstration that the state remembers its citizens' wealth.

Then Modi set a deadline. By 2035, he said, India must shed the colonial mindset entirely. The year carries symbolic weight: it marks 200 years since Macaulay's education policy, a foundational document of colonial rule. India has ten years to complete this work. The urgency seemed to stem from a particular frustration. When the world describes India as a global growth engine, Modi asked, how often do you hear that said with pride? The term "Hindu rate of growth" once described stagnation—a growth rate of two to three percent. That phrase linked a country's economic performance to the faith of its people, Modi noted, and the linkage was no accident. It was colonial thinking embedded in language itself. Breaking free of it, he suggested, requires not just faster growth but a different relationship to that growth—one where India names its own achievement without apology or self-doubt.