Digital Voters, Billionaire Kings, and a Waning Welfare State: What 25 Years in the 21st Century Reveal About New India
✍️ Written by Saket Suman
The winter of 2025 in India carries a peculiar stillness that precedes turning. The first quarter of the 21st century is ending with an inward silence that cannot be hidden despite tourists thronging major hotspots. This is a moment that is ripe for reflection, when the land of over a billion should pause, even if briefly, to glance over its shoulder before looking ahead again.
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| Representational Image: INSV Kaundinya on her maiden voyage from Porbandar to Muscat. Via: PM NaMo |
The arrival of Narendra Modi in 2014 was a culmination of accumulated frustrations, deferred dreams and a desire for strong hands steering the wheel. What began as a wave has since become a wall, and as the third term of the BJP-led NDA government continues to unfold, it is clear that this decade has been, and remains, dominated by a singular style of politics that prizes symbolic power. The Parliament has often echoed with thundering majorities but outside, voices have also risen with disquieting regularity. These have been seen in the eyes of farmers at borders, students in streets, and women in protest circles.
India’s democracy is alive. But increasingly, it is learning, or instead being taught, to breathe through a narrower pipe. The citizenship of this era is not what Ambedkar envisioned as a seamless right to be and belong. It is often biometric, platform-based, and increasingly difficult. Aadhaar became the world’s largest digital identity system, linking citizens to subsidies, bank accounts, and welfare. But with this digitization came an unspoken shift from constitutional rights to algorithmic access. If you are not linked, you may not exist. And if you question, you may not be heard, or deleted.
The debate over citizenship, both literal and metaphorical, exploded onto the streets with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). It became clear that the lines between inclusion and exclusion, between being a voter and being a suspect, had become thinner than the margins of a government form and it reminded the country of a preamble many had stopped reading. For a while, these became the conscience of the Republic. Until the pandemic arrived and scattered dissent into masked silence.
But, in a nation of contradictions, technology has also empowered. Rural India now outpaces urban centres in internet growth and penetration. UPI, the Unified Payments Interface, is now recorded over 10 billion transactions monthly. Welfare delivery, via Direct Benefit Transfers, reached millions without middlemen. CoWIN, during the pandemic, showcased a state capable of scale. A billion vaccine doses administered both as digital governance and medical urgency.
However, governance, when mediated by apps, also reconfigures participation. The citizen becomes a user; the state becomes a dashboard. Protests are inconvenient bugs in the system to be patched or ignored. The old romance of participatory democracy is quietly giving way to real-time metrics, dashboards, and digital control. The language has also changed from justice to targets, from debates to analytics.
Socially, India today resembles a mosaic in motion. The lines of caste, community, and gender have not disappeared but they have mutated. The Dalit assertion is no longer confined to the margins; cultural, political, and digital movements have given rise to new idioms of pride and reclamation. Regional voices, long dismissed as “vernacular”, now dominate international booker charts as well as political arenas. Women continue to face a system that offers recognition but resists redistribution. Despite high-profile women in positions of power, the female labour force participation remains around less than 30 per cent. The contradiction is more visible now due to rapid spread of information and people’s access to it.
Mental health, once spoken of in hushed tones, is now a matter of national reckoning. The pressure to perform, produce, and “make it” in the new India has created a silent epidemic of anxiety. The pandemic had lifted the veil and revealed both a broken healthcare infrastructure and a growing hunger for care, dignity, and human connection.
The economy has grown, but certainly not evenly. India may have more billionaires than ever but it also remains home to the world’s largest population of malnourished children. For every airport built, there are thousands of schools that still lack toilets. For every Smart City plan, there are old towns forgotten by both budget and memory. Jobs, especially for the youth, remain a crisis hidden behind GDP numbers. The National Sample Survey continues to paint a grim picture of disguised unemployment and informal sector precarity.
And even in the midst of it all, optimism remains as muscle memory. Indians continue to dream big, often against the tide. The startup ecosystem is still alive. Young people from small towns pitch AI ideas, build fintech apps, and launch climate-tech firms. But the ladder is still steep due to access to capital, mentorship, and skewed networks. The new India is aspirational but it is also stratified.
In these 25 years, India also found a louder voice in the world. The G20 presidency in 2023 was theatre. India styled itself as the voice of the Global South, as the convenor between East and West, between war and peace. India’s balancing act, on Russia, Palestine, and climate change, earned both admiration and ambiguity. The diaspora, meanwhile, remains a soft power asset. From Silicon Valley boardrooms to political corridors in London and Ottawa, Indian-origin faces dominate. But, in recent years, the diaspora has also become a site of conflict with targeted attacks, geopolitical tensions, and the uneasy question of who speaks for India abroad.
One of the most stirring stories of this quarter-century, however, came from the skies. Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon’s south pole, a feat achieved by no other nation. The image of triumphant ISRO scientists was more than just science; it was victorious symbolism. A country once mocked for launching satellites while battling poverty had now done both. Gaganyaan, Aditya-L1, and India’s solar ambitions mark a new chapter in confidence. The cosmos, once only within the reach of superpowers, now welcomes India with quiet respect.
But as we soar, we must also see the shadows.
Never before has the corporate capture of policy been so naked. The rise of business oligarchs, their proximity to power, their influence on decision-making, is no longer a matter of speculation. Legislative decisions that reshape entire sectors are often followed by sharp spikes in select corporate fortunes.
The state, while still formally democratic, increasingly acts in service of concentrated capital. High profile MPs who were once accountable to their party and people now echo the interests of their financial backers, sometimes secretly while hypocritically under pretense at others. Electoral bonds, designed to bring transparency, did little but shrouded funding in deeper secrecy. The machinery of democracy is intact but the levers are being pulled by fewer, wealthier hands.
This is not to demonise enterprise. India needs its businesses to innovate, build, and employ. But when policy bends too often to favour the few, when welfare budgets shrink while tax breaks multiply, when billionaires thrive as millions scrape then the promise of independence begins to vanish. A nation that does not invest adequately in its schools, hospitals, and nutrition cannot claim moral victory on the world stage. Dignity, not just development, must be the metric of success that India aspires ahead.
The clock has now turned on this quarter-century and India must pause out of discipline. This democracy, noisy and noble, still holds the capacity for course correction. It must re-centre its gaze on the citizen. It must rediscover the poetry of its founding as a compass. The republic is much more than what we inherit; it is what we remake, again and again.
A country of this scale will never be simple. Its contradictions will remain, and perhaps must but power must be answerable, growth must be equitable, and politics must remain porous to people instead of being impenetrable to them.
The next 25 years will be about the soul of the Indian state, whether it can balance ambition with accountability, strength with sensitivity, and modernity with morality. The choice is going to be between who gets to benefit and who gets left behind. Whether the state at large can opt to work for all its people as opposed to a few that has been the ongoing saga.