As Narendra Modi fatigue becomes palpable across India, a more fundamental question is being raised: have we been conned all along, despite promises of transformation? Was there a great void under all the slippery slogans about ‘Acche Din’, ‘New India 2022’ and ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’? Now, a study by political scientists Kevin Grier and Robin Grier confirms our suspicions.
In a nutshell, the paper published by Texas Tech University researchers finds that India’s governance and per capita income growth were worse under Modi than they would have otherwise been—whether led by Manmohan Singh’s UPA, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA or even the United Front coalition.
Some voters are drawn to a ‘Strongman Bargain’ offered by populists, accepting weaker institutions in return for improved economic performance. Instead, India under Modi got the worst of both worlds: weak institutions and slower growth. Modi transformed India, but decidedly for the worse.
The logic of this argument is consistent with many theories (see Rodrik et al. and Acemoglu et al.) that connect institutional strength to prosperity.
The researchers deploy an accepted statistical technique called the synthetic control method. They construct a “twin” called “Synthetic India”, whose economic performance strongly correlates with a weighted blend of comparable emerging economies. The fact that Synthetic India correlates with real India over a long 30-year period suggests that this counterfactual is robust, providing a baseline expectation of how India should have performed after 2014.
The paper has two findings. First, all ten governance indicators measuring institutional strength fell precipitously in Modi’s India, whether it was liberal democracy, judicial constraints, political corruption or freedom of expression (see the charts below).
The Modi effect across ten governance indicators
Second, and particularly damaging for those happy to embrace the pernicious strongman bargain, is that per capita income in 2023 “was about 10 percent below” what it otherwise would have been. This is strikingly similar to another research finding that, around the world, populist leaders of both the Left and the Right have lowered national GDP per capita by 10 per cent (over a 15-year period).
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A robust test of democratic backsliding
Now, an academic paper cannot be treated as gospel truth. And there are legitimate methodological questions, such as some findings not passing the test of statistical significance (p>0.05), and how the “Synthetic India” variable was constructed. Such debates are par for the course in social science research.
The paper’s critics also take issue with the V-Dem democracy indices, calling them subjective and biased. But the fact is that three separate global surveys using different methodologies show the same decline in democratic standards. And they show global democratic backsliding in many countries, not just India.
This makes Synthetic India more robust as a test of democratic backsliding, because India is not the only country backsliding, it’s just backsliding faster. A partisan Election Commission, SIR categories invented to exclude eligible voters, the use of investigative agencies to raise electoral funds for the BJP, freezing Opposition bank accounts, and raiding Opposition campaigns mid-election – these are just some of the blatant Modi-Shah attacks on our institutional fabric.
Ironically, such subjective international surveys become acceptable when they contain good news for the Modi government. Modi himself has proudly mentioned the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index and Logistics Performance Index, both of which use subjective variables. Modi also approvingly cited India’s progress in the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Competitiveness Report in 2019. In 2025, WEF founder Klaus Schwab was forced to step down after revelations that he had manipulated the rankings to favour India, among others.
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A huge loss for India
If you are a die-hard Modi supporter who couldn’t care less about institutions, there is no getting away from the finding that India’s per capita income was 10 per cent lower under Modi than it might otherwise have been. This translates into a cumulative notional loss of roughly $2.65 trillion over the decade. Compare that with India’s 2023 GDP of $3.5 trillion.
You might scoff that India is the fastest growing major economy today and its GDP ranking rose from 10th in 2014 to 4th in 2025 (before dropping back to 6th). Neither of these points contradicts the thesis. For the past decade, the Indian economy has grown slower than it did under the UPA (despite a recalculation that lowered many of the UPA numbers), in part due to the self-goal of demonetisation, which sharply reduced economic growth. It was a mad and hubristic move no other government would have risked. Private investment and household savings are at record lows.
Furthermore, as former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian and his co-authors have argued, India’s GDP growth between 2005 and 2011 was underestimated by about 1 to 1.5 percentage points, while growth between 2012 and 2023 was overestimated by about 1.5 to 2 percentage points. And the Covid pandemic affected the entire world economy (as did the 2008 financial crisis during the UPA), which means that India’s relative performance is unaffected.
No single study can or should be seen as the final word. But there is increasing evidence that Modi’s government has damaged both India’s institutions and its economy, as well as growing dissatisfaction across constituencies as varied as students, the middle class and farmers.
And this is why, as Modi’s carefully constructed image deflates, the entire edifice of his government is tottering along with him.
Amitabh Dubey is a Congress member. He tweets @dubeyamitabh. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)
Is whole of India ruled by Central govt, or is there any role of State govts in the problem?
State govts that are busy, increasing pensions of lazy bureacrats, and peddling freebeis instead of investments, are far more to blame.
Centre is the only one doing heavy lifting in capital expenditure. Every non-BJP state is fiscally irresponsible and going down the drain through burgeoning revenue expenditure.
But Congressis won’t see that.