Twenty-five years of seva: Empowering India’s young

On October 7, 2001, Narendra Modi took oath as Chief Minister of Gujarat at a moment when the state was still carrying the scars of a devastating earthquake, successive droughts and political uncertainty. He entered government not through the conventional apprenticeship of power, but from a life spent in organisation and public work. His mother, as he has often recalled, gave him two simple instructions: always work for the poor and never take a bribe. Twenty-five years later, that moment offers a useful starting point to understand a political journey that has altered the scale and vocabulary of governance in India. Among its most consequential dimensions has been the steady placing of young Indians at the centre of the national project.

India has always been a young country in numbers. What changed during the Modi years was the attempt to convert demography into agency. In Gujarat, the early emphasis on electricity, roads, industrial investment, education and administrative delivery created an environment in which a generation could begin to imagine opportunity beyond traditional boundaries. The lesson that emerged was straightforward: government cannot manufacture ambition, but it can create the conditions in which ambition becomes productive. When Modi moved to Delhi in 2014, that principle was expanded to the national scale.

The vocabulary of that period matters. Skill India, Startup India, Digital India, Make in India, Stand Up India and the Mudra programme were not isolated schemes. Together, they reflected a shift in the relationship between the state and the young citizen. The young Indian was no longer viewed merely as a job seeker waiting at the end of a government pipeline. He or she was increasingly imagined as a creator, entrepreneur, innovator and employer. More than 2.23 lakh startups had been recognised by March 2026, generating over 23 lakh direct jobs. Under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, more than 1.64 crore candidates have been trained or oriented. Mudra has taken formal credit to millions who would once have remained outside the banking system. These figures are important, but the deeper change is cultural. Risk-taking has become less exceptional. Enterprise has travelled from a few metropolitan enclaves into Tier-2 cities, small towns and districts that once stood outside the national innovation map.

There is an anecdotal truth behind these numbers. A young person in a smaller town today can build a product on cloud infrastructure, receive payments through UPI, market through digital platforms, register an enterprise online and aspire to sell to customers far beyond the geography of birth. This is a profound democratisation of possibility. Digital public infrastructure has reduced the distance between aspiration and execution. It has also changed the psychology of a generation. The young no longer need to migrate to a handful of cities merely to enter the modern economy. Increasingly, the modern economy can reach them. The same transformation is visible much earlier in the life cycle. More than 10,000 Atal Tinkering Labs now engage over 1.1 crore students across hundreds of districts. Children who might once have encountered science only through textbooks are experimenting with robotics, electronics, artificial intelligence and design. The point is not that every child will become an engineer or founder. The point is that curiosity itself is being treated as a national asset. A country that wants to lead in semiconductors, space, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and green technologies cannot wait until university to cultivate scientific confidence.

This is where the Modi years have also been marked by a widening of the horizon. Chandrayaan, the expansion of the space ecosystem, the semiconductor mission, the growth of defence manufacturing, the spread of digital payments and the push into artificial intelligence have given young Indians visible national missions in which to locate their own ambitions. Development is most powerful when it is not experienced as an abstraction. A school student watching India land near the lunar south pole, an engineering graduate working on chip design, a founder building for the next billion users, or a young technician entering an advanced manufacturing plant is participating in a story larger than individual advancement. National capability and personal aspiration begin to reinforce each other.

There has also been a conscious effort to connect youth with citizenship. Mera Yuva Bharat, launched in 2023, has grown into a platform with more than 2.46 crore registered young people, linking them with volunteering, experiential learning, internships, skill development and community initiatives. This is significant because the idea of youth empowerment cannot be reduced to employment alone. A confident republic needs citizens who see nation-building as participation rather than spectatorship. Modi has repeatedly spoken of Yuva Shakti not as a constituency to be courted, but as a force to be trusted.

That trust is central to the idea of Viksit Bharat 2047. The generation entering adulthood today will be in its forties when India completes one hundred years of Independence. It will carry the principal responsibility for whether India becomes merely a larger economy or a genuinely developed nation with technological depth, social mobility, institutional confidence and global influence. The next phase must therefore go beyond access. India has to relentlessly improve the quality of education, deepen research, expand apprenticeships, build world-class universities, connect skilling more closely with industry and ensure that young women participate fully in the economic transformation. The demographic dividend is not automatic. It is an opportunity with an expiry date.

Twenty-five years of Narendra Modi in governance can be interpreted through many lenses: infrastructure, welfare, national security, technology, diplomacy or political communication. Yet the youth lens reveals something especially important. His politics has consistently been accompanied by a politics of possibility. From rebuilding a state in 2001 to articulating the ambition of a developed India by 2047, the connecting idea has been that scale is not something India should fear. It is something India should harness.

A quarter century ago, Modi began his first day in government in a state emerging from disaster. Today, he leads a country whose young people are entering an age of extraordinary technological and geopolitical change. The most enduring test of these twenty-five years will not be the longevity itself. It will be whether a generation of young Indians was given the confidence, tools and institutional space to build beyond what previous generations thought possible. On that measure, the story of Modi's seva is inseparable from the story of India's youth coming into its own.

The writer is National Secretary and National Spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party and author of Advantage India: Reshaping the Future for an Equitable World Order; Views presented are personal.