With nearly a year to go before the general elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about numbers as well as qualitative achievements of the NDA government.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said that his National Democratic Alliance government was focused on uplifting the country not just in terms of economic and social metrics but also in terms of the self-confidence of Indians.
With nearly a year to go before the general elections, the Prime Minister highlighted strides that the government had made in areas such as healthcare, education, power and corruption in a speech-cum-presentation laced with statistics.
But equally he pointed to qualitative achievements the country had made – such as the Indian government’s rising clout as a global power. “When we say Rising India, we mean there should be a rise in the faith of our countrymen in the government,” he said.
The Prime Minister said the ruling BJP government had changed the lives of crores of people through schemes such as the Ujjwala Yojana, which aims to provide free gas cylinders to 80 million poor families in rural India, and through power projects that had brought down the number of un-electrified villages from about 18,000 in 2014 to less than 5,000 now.
Modi especially spent time outlining the government’s focus in the country’s North East region, pointing out that as Prime Minister, he had made 29 trips to the seven sisters, the most recent being today.
“My government has doubled the number of public toilets in the country from 6.5 crore in 2014 to 13 crore. Sanitation coverage has increased from 39 percent then to 80 percent now,” the PM said.
The PM used the occasion to also dwell on administrative changes that had been achieved on his watch. “In 2010, when the country faced a massive blackout due to grid failure, it was because various ministries did not talk to each other. Now that does not happen,” he said.
The PM also touched upon the NDA government’s vision of ‘New India by 2022’, saying that by the time the country’s reached its 75th year of independence, his government will have transformed it fully.
He added that to achieve that, the Modi government was focused on bringing about a cultural change in people’s attitudes, where initiatives are led by citizens, and pointed to examples such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which he said had become a mass movement.
