On June 10 2026, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed 4,400 days in office as the longest serving constitutionally elected prime minister of India, even if in absolute terms he will still need to serve his ongoing term till 2029, and win another election and stay in office until at least 2031 to beat India’s first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru.

However, Nehru had the advantage of leading an interim administration between 1947 and 1952, as the very foundations of the Indian republic were being laid. Modi’s rise to India’s premiership in 2014 was not only based on his own merits and image in being the long serving Chief Minister of the prosperous Western state of Gujarat, but also the anti-incumbency against the-then federal government of the Indian National Congress (INC).

The skyrocketing inflation and cost of living as well as the falling value of the Indian rupee were the very conditions under which Indian voters ousted the entrenched INC and ushered in Modi who was seen as a reformer and responsible policy maker as well as a counter force to the INC.

However, as luck would have it, a perfect storm of geopolitical and geoeconomic upheavals in part due to factors beyond India’s control and also the result of policy choices made by Modi’s Bhartiya Janta (BJP) in its 12 years in power is positing Modi and the BJP in the same light as the INC between 2010 and 2014.

According to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimate, India’s per capita income projected to be around $2,812 in 2026 will fall behind even Bangladesh at $2,911. While there are many facets to its economic challenges, there are several primary drivers of discontent; the first being the rapidly depreciating Indian rupee against the US dollar, which is rapidly shrinking the purchasing power of all Indians and their savings.

Secondly there is a sharp fall in net foreign investment and a connected fear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM) are going to shrink the remittances and profits of India’s cash cow Information Technology (IT) services industry which ushered in much of the socio-economic mobility and prosperity experienced by the Indian masses in the 21st century.

Also, the long standing administrative difficulty of providing enough well paying jobs to the rising literate masses that equate government jobs with social and employment security, alongside the rising burden of personnel costs and a shrinking need for manpower for various government functions has not been properly addressed.

Finally, between 2014 and 2026 India has not structurally reformed its economy or regulatory system for a true market economy to emerge. In practice India still follows the socialist model of heavily taxing the most productive strata of the working class and provides benefits to the least productive and destitute in the form of welfare programmes.

And in return for this high taxation, the vocal working classes feel they deserve a far higher quality of infrastructure, as India’s direct taxation rates are very similar to first world countries and services and public goods provided in return are still one of the lowest in terms of quality in the world.

While there is heavy criticism of the government by opposition figures including some with backgrounds as economists and with ties to the intellectual side of policy making, even domestic institutional investors are calling India’s macro situation dire, with shrinking relevance in the emerging high-tech centric global capital momentum.

This is the primary reason for the exit of Foreign Institutional Investors (FII) and Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPI) from Indian equities. India’s Domestic Institutional Investors (DII) have absorbed some of the equities sold by FIIs and FPIs, but it has only been possible by way of the financialisation of savings by the Indian middle class, which has been sold a dream of compounding wealth when investing in mutual funds and other instruments with equities exposure.

However, there is a recognition amongst the more financially literate that this could mean domestic investors could be left holding the proverbial bag as their foreign counterparts exit with their capital intact headed to invest in greener pastures. Compounding evidence in the form of the South Korean and Taiwanese stock markets surpassing their Indian counterpart’s total market capitalisation between January and May 2026, and the miniscule returns on investment observed across all Indian equities also further drives home the panic.

A major public relations disaster for Modi and the BJP has been the appeal to 'only' the working class to adjust their consumption habits, as evident from the apparent push back against the introduction of higher blends of ethanol fuel.

According to online consensus, uncertain availability of unblended fuel and the potential for vehicles to be damaged by incompatible fuel as well as the lower mileage that is inherent with the lower caloricly dense blended fuel will translate into a creeping erosion of wealth and capital assets for the Indian middle classes.

Another major crisis in the form of a sharp rise in food inflation is also expected to hit India, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organisation with an unusually severe El Nino expected to have the counter effect of delaying rains and pushing up the temperature across the Indian subcontinent also brewing.

This short term effect of climate change combined with the fertiliser crisis born out of the disruptions and conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, which will have the indirect effect of disrupting the productive yield of Indian crops for the upcoming seasons is yet to be realised.

While the scale of just how much all these disruptive factors will affect India’s economy over the long term is unclear, it is clear that India’s economy is the proverbial weak spot for the government of the day, and should be its biggest priority, above and beyond all other matters.