Picture a young Indian, 10 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 July 18, a rocket built by a private Indian company reached orbit. Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1, developed by a young Indian startup, became the first privately developed Indian orbital rocket to successfully reach space. India became the third country to achieve orbital launch capability through private enterprise.
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 10 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 simple line: government moving from “prohibited unless permitted” to “permitted unless prohibited”. That is the steady idea behind much of his decade’s work: 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 decades of government dominance, when reforms opened the sector to private participation across space activities. IN-SPACe was created to enable and regulate private companies, giving Indian entrepreneurs a route into an industry that had long been the preserve of the state.
Then came more. The liberalised Drone Rules of 2021 replaced a system that had been criticised for excessive paperwork and permissions, opening the way for wider use of drones in agriculture, mapping, infrastructure and other fields. Some changes were quieter, but mattered just as much. In 2021, maps were freed for private innovation.
In 2023, a single law removed criminal penalties from more than a thousand provisions, many tied to paperwork. The message was clear: a missed filing should not land an Indian in jail. And the numbers began to change. When Startup India began in 2016, India had only a few hundred recognised startups. Today, it has crossed two lakh, spreading beyond Bangalore and Delhi into smaller cities and towns. More than a hundred thousand have women founders, putting ambition into the hands of a new generation.
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. Financial inclusion, digital payments and targeted credit have brought millions of Indians who were once outside the formal economy into it. A vegetable seller and a startup founder can now move money through the same digital infrastructure. A young entrepreneur in a small town can access tools that once belonged almost exclusively to people born into the right networks.
Even the way the young are taught has been rethought. The National Education Policy challenges the old idea that the stream chosen at 16 must determine the rest of a person’s life. It creates greater flexibility across subjects and pathways, allowing young Indians to imagine education less as a narrow road and more as a field of possibilities.
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. A generation can be given every opportunity and still feel unseen. Narendra Modi has consistently sought to speak to India’s youth directly, including through his interactions with students around examinations, where he talks about pressure, fear, hope and ambition.
The message is simple: young Indians are not merely a problem to be managed or a vote to be counted. They are participants in the country’s future. That matters. 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 is increasingly willing to let us 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 who once stood outside a door. That door is open now. And so are 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.
P V Sindhu
Olympic medallist, deputy collector in the Government of Andhra Pradesh