On September 14, 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid the foundation stone of the bullet train from Mumbai to Ahmedabad. Japan lent 88,000 crore rupees of the cost of about 1.08 lakh crore. The loan runs for 50 years at an interest rate of 0.1 percent, and repayment begins after 15 years.
“The bullet train is in a way a big gift from Japan to India,” Modi said. “It is in a way a project being constructed for free.”
On October 24, 2025, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal spoke at the Berlin Global Dialogue about India’s trade talks. “We do not do deals in a hurry and we do not do deals with deadlines or with a gun to our head,” he said, as ThePrint reported.
India and the United Kingdom opened talks on a free trade agreement in January 2022. On April 22, 2022, during a visit to India, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he wanted the deal done by Diwali that year. On October 14, 2022, Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch said: “We are no longer working to the Diwali deadline.”
The negotiations concluded on May 6, 2025. Piyush Goyal and the British business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, signed the agreement at Chequers on July 24, 2025. Dawn described “three years of stop-start negotiations.”
The Arthashastra, the ancient treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, limits a merchant’s margin. In R. Shamasastry’s English translation: “The Superintendent of Commerce shall fix a profit of five per cent over and above the fixed price of local commodities, and ten per cent on foreign produce.”
In 2025 India negotiated a trade agreement with the United States while most Indian goods faced American tariffs of 50 percent. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal kept to one formula. “We want a fair, equitable and balanced trade deal,” he said on November 11. A week later, at the Indo-US Economic Summit in Delhi, he said: “When the deal will become fair, equitable and balanced, you will hear good news.”
Kudumbashree, a Kerala initiative “aimed at complete poverty eradication,” was launched in 1998. It is built on neighborhood groups, ayalkoottam, of 10 to 20 women from the same area. They meet every week and pool their savings. Membership is open to all adult women, one per family.
The groups run small enterprises, such as baby food units, catering, tailoring and poultry. In 2018 The News Minute counted “nearly 41.5 lakh members.”
In the Global Innovation Index of 2025, published by WIPO, India ranked 38th of 139 economies. A year earlier it was 39th.
In 2020-21 India’s gross expenditure on research and development was estimated at 0.64 percent of GDP, according to PRS Legislative Research. As a share of GDP, it had been declining since 2009-10. A newer release of the Department of Science and Technology puts it at 0.83 percent for 2021-22.
On March 27, 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the “Give It Up” campaign. It asked consumers to surrender their subsidy on cooking gas voluntarily. By April 2016, 1,00,06,303 consumers, just over one crore, had stopped using subsidized cooking gas, Deccan Chronicle reported.
In October 2014, on his radio program Mann Ki Baat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked listeners to buy khadi, hand-spun cloth. On November 2 he said: “I was told that khadi sales increased by almost 125 percent.” The Khadi Bhandar in Connaught Place, New Delhi, reportedly began registering daily sales of around 50 lakh rupees.
The size of the effect is disputed. The fact-checking site FactChecker found that khadi sales for the whole of 2014-15 rose by only 5.91 percent.
In 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman carried the budget papers in a bahi-khata, a traditional ledger, instead of a leather briefcase. “The tradition of briefcase, started by British, was inherited in India,” Deccan Herald wrote.
In February 2021 India presented its first paperless budget. Sitharaman carried a tablet that had been “placed inside a red cover.”