Promises, Promises – Governance and Growth in India under Modi

A data companion to the working paper<br>Grier & Grier · Texas Tech University · August 2026

“PM Modi has done an unbelievable job in India. I know the liberal Press here, they beat the hell out of him when he’s taken 400 million people out of poverty.”<br>– Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, 2024

vs.

“The Indian government is one of the most appalling in the world.”<br>– Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2023

Same country. Same decade. Same data. They can’t both be right – and it’s checkable.

01 · The promises

“Give BJP just 60 months.”

Modi’s 2014 campaign ran under one promise above all: achhe din aane wale hain (अच्छे दिन आने वाले हैं) – “good days are coming.” The good days had two concrete parts. The first was prosperity: “You gave Congress 60 years, give BJP just 60 months. We will change India’s future and bring about development in 60 months.” The second was clean, effective government – “minimum government, maximum governance.”

These weren’t promises to muddle through. They were promises to beat business as usual – to deliver the growth and governance that the old status quo would not have produced. That framing matters, because it tells you exactly how to grade him: compare Modi’s India against the India that would have existed without him.

A decade in, there are four ways the report card could have come back:

Four possible Indias, 2014–2024

Governance<br>ImprovesDeclines

Economy<br>Improves<br>Modi Promisericher and freer<br>Strongman Bargaingrowth at democracy’s expense

Declines<br>Democratic Paradoxfreer but poorer<br>Worst Caseneither

The rest of this page is the data’s answer.

02 · The measuring stick

Compared to what?

You can’t rerun the last decade without Modi. The next best thing is a data-driven stand-in: “Synthetic India,” a weighted blend of comparable countries, with the weights chosen so that the blend tracks the real India’s trajectory for the thirty years before Modi took office. If a portfolio of countries matches India’s path from 1984 to 2013, its path after 2014 is a credible estimate of the India that Modi inherited but did not govern.

Then the test is simple, and it is exactly the test Modi set for himself: did his India beat that one?

The raw materialIndia (black) and fourteen comparison countries before Modi, 1984–2013 – here plotted on income. Synthetic India is built from the countries that move like it.

One rule matters: the comparison countries have to be plausible stand-ins for the thing being measured. For income, that means large developing economies – China and Vietnam included. For democracy, one-party states are useless as counterfactuals, so the governance outcomes get their own pool of developing-world democracies. (The full donor-pool logic is in the researcher section below.) Each outcome then gets its own recipe, matched over the same thirty years – and graded the same way: did Modi’s India beat it?

03 · Maximum governance?

Ten measures of Indian democracy. Ten declines. Zero close calls.

We tracked ten indicators of governance and democratic health from the V-Dem project – electoral democracy, liberal democracy, corruption, equality before the law, constraints on the executive, freedoms of expression, association, and religion, and equal protection. For each one we built its own synthetic counterfactual from a pool of developing-world democracies, matched over the same thirty years.

Every panel below plots the same thing: India minus its counterfactual . A flat line at zero means Modi’s India performed exactly as the no-Modi India would have. Watch what happens at the dashed line.

All ten treatment effects are jointly significant at the 0.00 level – meaning India’s post-2014 decline is larger than every single placebo we can construct from the comparison countries, in all ten cases. Half the indicators end up more than 45% below their counterfactuals. And this is not because the counterfactuals soar: after 2014, they barely move. India falls.

The governance ledger · final-year gap, India minus Synthetic India

IndicatorGapAs % of India’s 2013 levelJoint p-value

Polyarchy (electoral democracy)−0.391−60.2%0.00<br>Liberal democracy−0.360−69.1%0.00<br>Legislative constraints on the executive−0.242−28.8%0.00<br>Judicial constraints on the executive−0.105−12.7%0.00<br>Political corruption (higher = more corrupt)+0.272+46.8%0.00<br>Equality before the law−0.221−30.4%0.00<br>Freedom of association−0.232−29.6%0.00<br>Freedom of expression−0.488−56.2%0.00<br>Freedom of religion−1.407−168.7%0.00<br>Equal protection under the law−0.190−26.1%0.00

Gaps are in the units of each index in the final treatment year. All indices run 0–1 except freedom of religion (interval scale). Joint p-values are standardized post-treatment p-values from randomization inference.

The candidate who campaigned hardest against corruption presided over a 47% rise in it – relative to the India that never elected him.

04 · The 60-month economy

So...