Picture a young Indian, ten years ago, saying she wanted to build a rocket. Not join ISRO. Build one. Her own. The room would have gone quiet, and someone kind would have explained that this was not something a person like her could do. Space belonged to the government. Dreams that size were for other countries.
On 18th July 2026, a rocket built by a private Indian company reached orbit. It was made by Skyroot, founded by two young engineers who left safe jobs to chase exactly that impossible dream. With it, India became one of only three countries on earth, alongside the United States and China, where a private citizen's company can reach space. The girl who was told no can now say she wants to be Elon Musk and mean it as a plan, not a punchline. She can simply begin.
Nothing about the talent had changed in those ten years. India always had the talent. What changed was the answer. For most of our history, the answer to a big dream in India was "you cannot." Not because you weren't good enough, but because the door simply did not exist. The quietest and largest achievement of Narendra Modi's leadership is that the answer became "why not."
It is worth understanding how deep that shift goes. For decades, ambition in India ran into a wall of permissions. To do almost anything that mattered, you needed a licence, a clearance, a contact, or the right family name. The country was never short of dreamers. It was short of doors. And when doors are few, they open first for people who already have keys. The young, the poor, the ones without a surname that opened rooms, waited outside.
PM Modi's real insight was to look at that wall and see it for what it was. He put the shift in a single line: government moving from "prohibited unless permitted" to "permitted unless prohibited." That is the steady idea behind his whole decade's work, to take down the wall of permissions, and build in its place a country of open doors. A country where it does not matter whose child you are, only what you are willing to build.
Look at what has been opened. Space went first, in 2020, after sixty years as a government monopoly, handed to anyone with the skill to launch. Then the airspace above our fields, where a rulebook that once demanded dozens of forms and permissions for a single drone flight was torn up almost entirely, so that a teenager in a small town can now build a drone, register it on a phone, and start a business. Those same drones have been placed in the hands of thousands of women in villages, turning a piece of the future into a day's honest earning.
Some of it was quieter and mattered just as much. In 2021, maps were freed, so that an Indian company no longer needed clearance to survey the country it already lives in. In 2023, a single law reached into hundreds of laws and pulled the criminal penalty out of more than a thousand, most of them paperwork, so that a missed filing stopped being something a person could be jailed for.
From barely a single space startup in 2014, India now has around 440, alongside hundreds of drone startups where there were once none.
But opening doors is only half of it. An open door means little if you have no way to reach it. This is where the fairness in the idea shows itself. When Startup India began in 2016, the country had around 350 recognised startups.
Today it has more than two lakh, and they have created over twenty lakh jobs, and they are no longer only in Bangalore or Delhi but in small towns in every corner of the map, with more than a hundred thousand of them started by women.
The loans were aimed, on purpose, at the people the old system overlooked first, first-time founders from Dalit and tribal families, and women. And hundreds of millions of Indians who had never had a bank account were finally brought in, with a simple phone becoming a bank. A vegetable seller and a startup founder now move money the same way.
Even the way the young are taught has been rethought. The National Education Policy took the stream a sixteen-year-old is sorted into and stopped treating it as a life sentence. She can mix subjects that were never allowed to sit together, leave a degree halfway and come back to it without starting over, and study at a world-class standard without leaving the country to find one, because the world's universities have begun opening campuses here instead.
All of it points to one thing, a country that has finally chosen to trust its own young people. For most of our history, our brightest felt they had to board a flight to build anything real. We lost them, quietly, year after year, to other countries that had the doors we lacked. By opening those doors here, in space and silicon, in software and the classroom, this leadership has given that talent a reason to stay, and even a reason to come home. Building the future stopped being something you left India to do. It became something you could do because you stayed.
And here is the part that no policy paper can capture, the part that makes all the rest land differently. A generation can be given every opportunity and still feel unseen. Narendra Modi has never treated India's youth as a problem to be managed or a vote to be counted. He sits with students before their exams and talks with them, plainly, about fear and pressure and hope, not as a ruler lecturing subjects but as someone who remembers what it is to be young and afraid and full of dreams at the same time. He speaks to the young as equals. He does not talk down to them, and he does not talk over them. When hard moments come, he tends to face them head-on, showing the young by his own example that nothing has to be concealed.
That is not a small thing. It may be the biggest thing of all. Because a young person who is spoken to as if she is capable slowly starts to believe that she is. And a young person who believes she is capable is exactly the kind of person who starts a rocket company in a rented room and, a few years later, reaches orbit.
Every generation inherits limits it did not choose. Our grandparents inherited scarcity. Our parents inherited permission, the long wait for someone above them to say yes. We inherited something different: a country that finally trusts us to build it.
That is the real measure of this leadership. Not a scheme or a statistic, but a change in what a young Indian is allowed to imagine. The rocket that reached space in July was built by people once told the door did not exist. It exists now, and so do a thousand others. The only question left for a young Indian is no longer whether she is allowed to dream. It is how far she intends to go.
(The author is a two-time Olympic medallist, and currently serves as a Deputy Collector in the Government of Andhra Pradesh)