This article was first published on news18.com | September, 08, 2023
In his maiden Independence Day speech as Prime Minister on August 15, 2014, Narendra Modi broke convention by speaking extempore for 65 minutes. Sporting a polka-dotted Gujarati red-and-green turban, Modi played the outsider card, explaining to a national audience how Delhi’s elites looked upon him as an ‘untouchable’ and how he found not one united government but many, with government departments often fighting with each other rather than working as one.
All the usual touchpoints of the Modi model that were soon to become signature programmes of his government — ‘Digital India’, mobiles, Swachh Bharat and toilets-first featured in this inaugural Red Fort speech.
It was also the first time Modi spoke about the idea of the Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (Prime Minister’s People Money Scheme). In a country where a majority of the citizens had never had a bank account, the scheme’s ambition was sky high. It promised a zero-balance bank account, a debit card and an insurance safety net of Rs 100,000 to every poor Indian.
With the Aadhaar pipeline in place, Modi, in that 2014 speech, outlined the contours of the first grand expansion of social welfare and financial inclusion that it was about to engender. Tellingly, he compared the mobile in the digital age to the railways in a previous era — a grand connector of the nation. “I wish to connect the poorest citizens of the country with the facility of bank accounts through this yojana,“ he said. “There are millions of families who have mobile phones but no bank accounts…. We have to change this scenario…. There was a time when we used to say that the railways provided connectivity to the country. That was it. I say that today it is IT that has the potential to connect each and every citizen of the country and that is why we want to realise the mantra of unity with the help of ‘Digital India’.”
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This article was first published on news18.com | September, 08, 2023
