There is a simple way to measure the distance India has travelled in the last decade: listen to the prime minister's Independence Day speeches. Things have changed; it is undeniable. But what has also changed is the very nature of what Prime Minister Narendra Modi has to talk about.
In the early years of the Modi government, the speeches were often about problems that we may today consider as ordinary: toilets, electricity, poverty, roads, bank accounts, fertiliser shortages. But the prime minister's tone was urgent when he addressed them. The challenge was to fix what was broken, reach those who had been left out.
Over the years, his vocabulary began to change. The conversation moved from access to aspiration, from plugging gaps to building capabilities, from solving immediate problems to creating systems that could prevent those problems from defining India again. From dignity to delivery and onwards to dreams - that has been the trajectory our nation has taken in just about 13 years of PM Modi's leadership.
Perhaps that is also why the length and sweep of his Independence Day addresses have become a phenomenon in themselves. For a prime minister whose working life is famously relentless, the sheer time devoted to presenting the nation's journey from the Red Fort is telling. These are not simply annual speeches; read together, they become something closer to a running record of the country's transformation.
And there is no better starting point than the promise PM Modi made in 2023. He said, in part, "When I came in 2014, I came with a promise of change. Through reform, perform, transform, I have turned this promise into belief. Based on my performance, you blessed me once again in 2019. The next five years will be the years of unprecedented development."
It will be impossible to analyse every change, but using the Independence Day speeches as a lens, let's look backwards before looking forward. If "unprecedented development" was the promise, the Independence Day speeches provide an unusually revealing way of asking: what happened to the problems that once occupied the prime minister's attention?
The answer lies in how India moved from firefighting to future-proofing.
When Poverty Became A Possibility We Could Defeat
In 2014, poverty was presented as a national challenge requiring a national resolve. PM Modi asked, "If the people of India could remove such a big empire without the power of the government, without weapons and even without resources, then friends, it is the need of the hour to eradicate poverty, can we not overcome poverty? Can we not defeat poverty?"
Seven years later, in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic, he said, "The way India has kept the stoves burning in the poor households by providing free food grains to 80 crore countrymen continuously for months during the pandemic is not only astonishing to the world but also a matter of discussion."
Readers should appreciate that a decade is a minuscule period in the trajectory of a billion-plus nation. And by 2023, the vocabulary had moved beyond simply fighting poverty, to measuring people who had escaped it: "In my first five-year term, 13.5 crore of my fellow poor brothers and sisters have broken free from the chains of poverty and entered the new middle class. There can be no greater satisfaction in life than this."
By 2026, when PM Modi reiterated how 25 crore people had risen out of poverty, it was nothing less than a declaration that we were finally and perhaps for the first time in our history arresting the backward slide and beginning to move forward.
This year, he gave us the direction forward.
The courage to dream big and achieve big is the hallmark of the new India, and the world has been forced to take note of our efforts. The welfare reached the people, and the nation reached for the stars. Few contrasts capture the transformation better than the distance between the 2014 and 2026 speeches.
In 2014, the prime minister spoke about something as fundamental as sanitation and dignity: "Can't we just make arrangements for toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters?"
That was the India that needed to solve first-order problems. But the same national conversation eventually reached semiconductors. This year, announcing seven to eight new semiconductor plants in the pipeline, the prime minister hinted at technological sovereignty. In today's digital world and the age of technology, we understand the importance of chips. Whether it is electronic goods, medical equipment or transportation systems, chips are indispensable to all of them. Without chips, the entire world could come to a standstill. We were still building, but the 'what' had changed dramatically. We once built for our most basic needs. Today, it builds for the world's most advanced ones.
Similarly, in 2016, PM Modi spoke of basic rural infrastructure, that rural roads are a perpetual issue in our country. Every rural citizen craves for pakka roads. In 2025, India's Gaganyaan aimed at becoming aatmanirbhar with tasks like building our own space station.
This year, PM Modi spoke about how a homegrown startup was able to send a rocket to space in a first attempt. We are still thinking of connectivity, but in a little over a decade, it has moved from the gramin ilaaka (rural areas) to the great beyond, as outer space is often referred to.
There are far too many examples that can be sought out, as they should be - because they show us how far we have come, and how we are going to continue ahead at full steam - all aboard the reform express.
Startup India, the prime minister's flagship initiative that redefined how young India viewed the future, is a perfect example. In 2015, it was a resolve. "I have to provide strength to startups and, therefore, I resolve that in the coming days 'Startup India' and 'Stand-up India' will be there."
A year later, the resolve had become an ambition to ensure that no district or block was left untouched by startups. By 2021, startups were becoming unicorns; by 2023, India had entered the world's top three startup ecosystems. And by 2025, more than 300 Indian startups were operating in the space sector alone.
Nari Shakti Becomes Changemaker
Consider once the significance of this journey for India's women, our Nari Shakti. They had to wait for darkness due to lack of toilets - something that the prime minister spoke of in his very first Independence Day address. By 2018, he declared that institutional doors into the armed forces, including the Permanent Commission, had been thrown open to them. By 2023, women in villages were becoming entrepreneurs, technology users and leaders.
It is indeed fulfilling to see that while on the one hand our CEOs are dominating the global business landscape, on the other hand one crore mothers and sisters joined women self-help groups and are becoming 'lakhpati didis'. By 2025, PM Modi told us that our Nari Shakti is dominating startups, space, sports and the armed forces and in 2026, he assured that soon, we will see six crore 'lakhpati didis' bolstering our rural economy.
We have moved beyond simply empowering women by making them leaders and epicentres of transformation. From ensuring basic dignity towards ensuring 33 per cent representation in parliament and state assemblies. Are these not women-led development in action?
The real story of these speeches, then, is not merely what India has achieved, but how profoundly its sense of possibility has changed. PM Modi's speeches are perhaps the clearest measure of change. They show how a nation acquired the confidence to solve problems that once seemed impossible.
That is the real audacity of a nation's ambition: to dream bigger, and having travelled far enough to have the confidence and the conviction to transform those dreams into reality.
(Amit Malviya is the national head of the BJP's information and technology and Sah Prabhari of West Bengal)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
