When reports about the deployment of 1,500 specially equipped vehicles to cover the country’s 2.5 lakh panchayats first appeared, it was officially called ‘Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra‘. Supervised by senior officers and equipped with GPS and drones, these propaganda buses blare Modi’s speeches and songs praising him.

Then, all of a sudden, Modi himself renamed this government-funded programme as ‘Modi ki guarantee vehicle’. The whole focus of the renamed campaign is on Modi’s persona. In many places, people stopped the vans and asked why ‘Modi Sarkar’ and not ‘Bharat Sarkar’ was written on the vans.

Among the places where people protested were Ahmednagar, Nashik, Satara, Jalna, Parbhani, Akola, Hingoli, Nanded, Ratnagiri, and Buldhana. In some places, people took objection to the lotus symbol (BJP party symbol) on the vans. They produced videos to prove their allegation.

In Delhi, protests against the guarantee vehicles took place at seven places, when groups of people objected to the use of government funds for Modi’s propaganda.

The whole programme is now being turned into a vehicle to perpetuate the Modi cult and the inevitability of centralised power. For this, like other elected dictators of the 21st century, Modi praises his own attributes. Sample these:

• “People trust Modi’s guarantee because all other parties make false promises,” says Modi.
• “My guarantee is the reflection of my hard work, dedication, and perseverance”: Modi talks of himself.
• Modi says, “Whenever hope fades, Modi ki guarantee begins.”
• Emphasising people’s trust in him, Modi said his guarantee meant he alone could fulfill them.
• Modi said in Varanasi, “Modi’s guarantee has become a super hit.”
• At a rally in Thrissur, he repeated the phrase ‘Modi’s guarantee’ 18 times in a 19-minute speech.

No one knows how many schemes he has announced in the past 10 years. This writer counted 142 recorded schemes. An official list cites 40 schemes with duly approved logos which were announced in 2015 and 2016. There are at least 20 schemes with ‘PM’ prefixes (the list), like PM Kisan and PM Awas Yojana. Then there are schemes starting with the word ‘Amrit’ (Amrit Kaal, Amrit Bharat Trains), a favourite term for Modi.

Ghosts of failed schemes

No formal evaluation of the Modi schemes has been made nor are any authentic figures available. Most are flippant claims made by the PM or his ministers aimed at boosting the image. From 2017-18, the mainstream media has ceased carrying critical reports. The real-time implementation of Modi’s ‘guarantee’ has never been subjected to scrutiny.

Take the case of Modi’s guarantee on Ganga cleaning. Renamed Namami Gange, the project was announced in May 2014 as Modi’s “life’s mission”. As per a 2021 report, only 20% of the sewerage plant of the Rs 20,000 crore scheme was completed. The National Mission for Clean Ganga expects to add 7,000 million litres of sewage by 2026. This is the fate of the PM’s ‘life’s mission’ after 10 years in power.

Look at another Modi guarantee — 100 new smart cities — announced in June 2015. By mid-2015, 14 countries, including the United States, France, and China, lined up to grab lucrative contracts for the Rs 4 lakh crore pie. France’s Thales and the US-based IBM and Cisco Systems began consultations for the project’s 18 million-dollar digital market. Prospects of land at cheap rates were additional attractions.

The World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB), and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) offered loans for the project. Financial dailies reported PwC, McKinsey, Lea Associates, and Bosch were to be the empaneled as consultants. But then there was a sudden silence. And the dream city project became just another scheme to modernise small bits and pieces of existing cities.

The case of Modi’s pre-election guarantee to remit Rs 15 lakhs in every Indian’s bank account is rather curious. This led to the BJP leaders making contradictory statements. Modi’s original remarks at an election rally in Kanker in Chhattisgarh were denied six years later by defence minister Rajnath Singh.

However, his cabinet college Nitin Gadkari said Modi made the guarantee because they were not expecting to win the election. “Now we must just laugh and move on,” Gadkari said. Amit Shah, Modi’s most authentic voice, confirmed the Rs 15 lakh guarantee but said it was just an ‘idiom’ (jumla)

People, however, had treated the ‘jumla’ as a genuine guarantee and rushed in large numbers to open new bank accounts and become labharthis.

Look how the ghosts of failed schemes haunt the graveyard of Modi’s forgotten guarantees.

• Modi announced the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project in September 2014 with big fanfare. Bhumipujan was held on September 14, 2017, and after frequently shifting goalposts, the target for completion was fixed for August 15, 2022. But, as per the latest reports, a new deadline for the Vapi-Sabarmati section is 2027. That will make it 13 years’ delay. Meanwhile, the project cost has almost doubled from Rs 1.08 lakh crore to Rs 2 lakh crore.
• In April 2017, Modi made another guarantee — to double farmers’ income by 2022. Six years later, no one wants to talk about it.
• “If BJP comes to power, I will give one crore jobs every year,” Modi said at an election rally. Rajnath Singh, who also spoke said Modi will wipe out terrorism as well. Nine years in power, the job crisis worsened and we hear terrorist stories every day.
• We will send an Indian to space before the end of 2022, Modi thundered from the ramparts of Red Fort in 2018. Modi’s guarantee was ably hyped by the loyal media with special stories. It is already 2024, and there is no trace of a manned flight.
• In April 2018, Modi declared that all villages in India have been electrified. But Forbes finds out that 31 million households are still in the dark. India Today also said the ground situation did not establish Modi’s claim.

Insistence on Aadhar seeding has pushed the rural job scheme into a serious crisis. Over 34.8% of registered workers and 12% active workers have lost jobs. According to LibTech India, 7.6 crore job cards have been deleted since April 2022. That is the fate of one of the early Modi guarantees.

Two to four lakh beneficiaries of PM Kisan launched as an answer to the farmers’ agitation have been left in the lurch as they are not able to seed Aadhar with the accounts. Much is talked about the success of the Nal se Jal scheme, another Modi showpiece. However, an independent survey conducted in October 2022 in about 13,000 villages found that only 5,298 of them were actually ‘har ghar nal’ villages. Only 62% of households had fully functional connections.

Ujjwala Yojana is often cited as a successful Modi guarantee. But the fact is that despite the Rs 200 subsidy, the labharthis took zero or one LPG cylinder in 2022-23. Data revealed by a Right to Information (RTI) question showed that of the 9.58 crore PMUY households, 1.8 crore bought no refills while another 1.51 cr bought just one refill.

This was due to the hefty hike in prices of cylinders. Parliament was told that in Madhya Pradesh, 13,000 labharthis had never refilled after connection.

Ayushman Bharat, another showpiece of Modi guarantee, is riddled with fraudulent transactions, invalid names, duplicate PMJDY IDs, and unrealistic date of birth and size of a family in a household, The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) also revealed large-scale payments to dead patients. For revealing such irregularities, the national auditor was castigated and concerned officials were punished with transfers

Launched in July 2015, Skill India had raised much hope among the aspiring youth. However, from the beginning, the scheme was plagued by wrong selection of courses, outdated technological level, and fraudulent reporting. Investigation by another daily found a majority of institutes that provided training to the youth lacked proper infrastructure.

This forced India Inc. to keep out of the Skill India programme. Similar has been the case with the PM Gram Sadak Yojana and solar energy programme. As we go to press, Modi has announced yet another scheme – of placing solar panels on the dwellings of the poor. How many years will elapse before this too is forgotten?

(P. Raman is a veteran journalist. Courtesy: The Wire.)