By Naresh Kella
There is a clarity that comes from twenty years of reading numbers professionally. Not optimism, not politics – clarity. For Naresh Kella, Chartered Accountant and former Independent Director at Power Finance Corporation, that clarity produced a verdict that surprised even him. “In 2014, every boardroom conversation I sat in circled back to dependency – on imported defence, on foreign technology, on a banking system that had left half the country behind,” he says. “What India built in the twelve years since has no parallel in modern history.”
The Financial Foundation
Kella begins where every good accountant begins – with the base. Jan Dhan opened 53 crore bank accounts. UPI today processes 14 billion transactions monthly – more than any payment system on earth. Direct Benefit Transfer delivered Rs 34 lakh crore directly to citizens, eliminating the intermediaries that consumed welfare spending for generations. GIFT City, India’s International Financial Services Centre in Gujarat, attracted over 700 regulated entities. “For the first time,” Kella reflects, “India stopped thinking as a peripheral economy and started thinking as a global one.”
Perhaps no sector tells the story of India’s transformation more completely than defence. In 2014, India was the world’s largest arms importer – spending billions on equipment it could not build, dependent on foreign suppliers for the platforms that secured its borders and protected its people. By 2024, that dependency had been fundamentally dismantled. India now exports defence products to 85 countries. Domestic production has crossed Rs 1.27 lakh crore. Defence exports grew thirty-fold – from Rs 686 crore in 2013-14 to over Rs 21,000 crore in 2023-24. Two defence industrial corridors are operational in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. INS Vikrant – India’s first indigenously designed and built aircraft carrier – was commissioned in 2022. The Tejas Light Combat Aircraft is in active service and attracting export interest. The Advanced Towed Artillery Gun System and the Pralay ballistic missile represent homegrown capabilities that did not exist at this scale a decade ago.
“India did not just build infrastructure in twelve years. It built the conviction that infrastructure at this scale was possible.”
Infrastructure – From Announcement to Completion
Indian Railways expanded by 91,000 kilometres, redeveloped 1,300 stations and launched the Vande Bharat Express – designed and made in India – across 100-plus routes. Dedicated Freight Corridors spanning 3,000 kilometres are driving logistics costs from 14 per cent of GDP toward 8 per cent. Aviation grew from 74 to 149 airports. UDAN connected 80 airports to smaller cities. “What struck me most was not the scale,” Kella says. “It was the consistency. Infrastructure was announced and built – not announced and forgotten.”
And then there is the announcement that carries a message far beyond sport. India will host the Commonwealth Games 2030 – a decision that places India on the global stage as a nation with the world-class infrastructure, organisational capacity and international credibility to host one of the world’s most complex multi-sport events. For a country that was once hesitant about its own capabilities on the world stage, hosting the Commonwealth Games 2030 is a declaration that the infrastructure built in the last twelve years is not just functional. It is world-class.
Education, Defence and Human Capital
IITs grew from 16 to 23. Medical colleges from 387 to over 700, adding 1 lakh MBBS seats. India became the world’s largest source of medical graduates and fastest-growing medical tourism destination – 7 lakh international patients annually, USD 9 billion in revenue. Defence moved from 70 per cent imports to exporting to 85 countries, with domestic production crossing Rs 1.27 lakh crore. Startup India built the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. Atmanirbhar Bharat became an industrial reality, not a slogan.
Perhaps the most underreported achievement of this period is one that rarely appears in economic analyses. For decades, Left Wing Extremism – Naxalism – posed one of India’s most persistent internal security challenges, affecting hundreds of districts across multiple states and claiming thousands of lives. In 2024, the Government of India announced the effective elimination of organised Naxal presence across the country – a security transformation that eluded every previous government for over five decades. This is not simply a law and order achievement. It is a development achievement – because the districts that were once Naxal-affected are now receiving infrastructure, welfare and governance access for the first time. “When the State reaches where it was previously unable to go,” Kella notes, “that is the truest form of last-mile delivery.”
“The balance sheets of nations do not lie. India’s shows a country that stopped borrowing someone else’s vision and started building its own.”
Kella has documented this transformation in India: A Nation Rising – tracing the journey through real lives across every sector of change. It carries a foreword by Shri Mansukh Mandaviya, Honourable Union Minister of Labour and Employment. “Viksit Bharat 2047 is a target earned sector by sector,” he says. “For the first time in thirty years, I believe the trajectory is real. The numbers are finally adding up – not just on paper, but in lives.”
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