NEW DELHI: From access to aspiration and from problems to potential – the focus of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speeches has kept changing since 2014.Those tracking his speeches over the last 12 years have noted how in the initial year, Prime Minister Modi focused on issues such as toilets, bank accounts, poverty and fertiliser shortages. That has given way to attention to priorities like 6G, semiconductor, AI and quantum computing.If 2014 had mention of toilets as a challenge, Saturday he renewed his pitch for women’s reservation in legislature. “In the early years of Modi govt, the speeches were often about problems that we may today consider ordinary. But PM’s tone was urgent when he addressed them. The challenge was to fix what was broken, reach those who had been left out,” said an official.As the country has progressed, so has the theme of his speeches, with a constant nudge to move to the next level, while setting the bar high, officials said.
In all 13 speeches, PM Modi focused on taking the country forward.
In all his 13 speeches so far, the pitch has always been on taking the country forward and ensuring everyone in society benefits from the gains and the schemes.“Over the years, his vocabulary began to change. The conversation moved from plugging gaps to building capabilities, from solving immediate problems to creating systems that could prevent those problems from defining India again,” the official added.In 2014, Prime Minister Modi called for eradicating poverty. Over the years, the focus has shifted to building a developed nation as poverty levels fell and crores moved out of extreme poverty.So, in Prime Minister Modi’s 2026 speech, he underlined how social security cover has seen a four-fold jump to 100 crore citizens in the last 12 years.
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Women have remained a prominent theme over the past 12 years.If in 2014 he highlighted the plight of women who had to wait for sunset to venture out to ease themselves in the open since they did not have access to toilets, by 2018, the attention had moved to permanent commission for women in the armed forces.And, in his latest speech, PM Modi underlined the need for 33% reservation for women in legislatures, for which he sought the opposition’s support.The shift is also visible in the focus on farmers – from preventing farmer suicides to tapping global markets through FTAs.
