“The land north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains is called Bhārata, where the descendants of Bhārata dwell.”

In February 2016, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi bent down and touched the feet of a woman more than a hundred years old. Kunwar Bai Yadav of Kotabharri village, in Chhattisgarh’s Dhamtari district, owned about two dozen goats, the savings of a long life. She sold seven of them to build a toilet at home. Her example helped her village end open defecation, and a woman past 100 years of age became one of the many faces of the Swachh Bharat Mission.

Walk into any household in India, and four things decide whether life is secure: the kitchen, the toilet, the doctor’s bill, and the means to earn. For generations, each was a source of either drudgery or dread: smoke in the kitchen, a long wait for nightfall, a debt that could swallow a lifetime’s savings, and a moneylender’s ledger because no bank would lend against so little.

Far out in the Andamans, A Venkatalakshmi used to cook on a wood-fired chulha. In the monsoon, there was often no dry firewood, and the smoke made her children ill. One day, she heard about Ujjwala from her neighbours, applied for and got a gas connection.

In the hills of Meghalaya, at Umsning near Shillong, Pooja Thapa needed surgery for kidney stones. She paid nothing for it. In May 2020, she became the 10-millionth patient treated under Ayushman Bharat.

And in Manali, a woman who sold vegetables took a Mudra loan of ₹2.5 lakh in 2015-16, with no collateral to offer. She repaid it, and lenders then trusted her with ₹5 lakh, ₹10 lakh and ₹15 lakh. Today, she runs a ration-shop of her own. In April 2025, she shared with the PM her story of how Mudra has become a silent revolution.

Four women, from the Andamans to the hills of Meghalaya, from a village in Chhattisgarh to a market in Manali, none lacking in aspiration — what they lacked was access, to clean fuel, to sanitation, to a hospital bed, and to credit. For decades, the poor were treated as recipients of doles, handed relief without choice or voice. Development was measured by the growth rate, and only rarely by the life of a single home.

Our nation-builders never accepted that measure. Mahatma Gandhi wanted an India “in which the poorest shall feel that it is their country in whose making they have an effective voice.” Babasaheb Ambedkar measured a community’s progress by the progress of its women. Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya called the idea antyodaya, the rise of the last person. A nation is judged not by those at the top of the ladder but by those on its lowest rung.

PM Modi has turned this philosophy into a method of government. Its focus is the poor, women, the young and farmers. Its standard is saturation — not merely a showcase village or a sample district but every eligible household. Its instrument is direct delivery, so that what the State sends is what the citizen receives. In 1985, PM Rajiv Gandhi admitted that only about 15 paise of every rupee meant for the poor reached them. Today, through Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and the mobile phone, nearly ₹50 lakh crore has gone straight into beneficiaries’ accounts. The scale has no parallel in any democracy. NITI Aayog estimates that nearly 250 million Indians left........

© hindustantimes