Puducherry, Sep 16: The villagers were avoiding the bus. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, wanted to know why. They told him they were waiting for the express bus. It cost more, but made fewer stops and got them to their destination faster.
For K Kailashnathan, the senior bureaucrat who was with Modi that day, the episode became one of the clearest examples of how the Chief Minister looked at an ordinary interaction and drew a larger policy question from it.
“People want speed. They don’t care about spending extra money if they have speed,” Kailashnathan recalled Modi telling him.
Nearly two decades later, Kailashnathan, who worked in the Gujarat Chief Minister’s Office for 18 years and remained Chief Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister until 2024, remembers the incident as an insight into the way Modi approached governance: start with what people experience on the ground, identify what they value, and then look for a way to build it into policy.
The Puducherry Lieutenant Governor was speaking to a group of journalists from Jammu and Kashmir in Puducherry ahead of Prime Minister Modi’s birthday on September 17.
Kailashnathan, a 1979-batch IAS officer, worked as Principal Secretary and Additional Chief Secretary to the Gujarat Chief Minister from 2006 to 2013 and then continued as Chief Principal Secretary from 2013 to June 2024. His official profile also records his association with Gujarat’s drinking-water grid, urban development, ports and the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam.
The bus episode, he said, stayed with him because it was not about a major project or a government scheme but about time. The villagers were willing to pay more to reach their destination sooner.
For Kailashnathan, Modi saw in that exchange something larger about public expectations, that people were not merely looking for a service, but wanted it to be faster and more efficient.
That way of thinking, he said, was visible in several of the decisions taken during Modi’s years as Gujarat Chief Minister.
Kailashnathan recalled Modi’s emphasis on connectivity, particularly in rural Gujarat.
The idea, he said, was not limited to building major highways between cities. Roads also had to connect farmers to the places where their produce was collected, processed and sold.
He cited roads developed to connect villages and farming areas to dairy centres.
Milk, he said, could spoil before reaching the dairy because of poor road connectivity and the time taken to transport it. The answer was to bring the road closer to the point of production.
Kailashnathan recalled Modi referring to such roads as part of a wider approach to connectivity, including Kisan Path and Pragati Path.
The underlying idea, he said, was that infrastructure had to be designed around how people actually used it.
Kailashnathan also recalled what he described as a major change in Gujarat’s drinking-water landscape during Modi’s tenure.
When Modi became Chief Minister, he said, around 85 per cent of Gujarat’s drinking water came from groundwater.
By the time he left office, Kailashnathan said, the proportion had effectively been reversed, with around 85 per cent coming from surface-water sources.
The change involved the expansion of the state’s water network and pipelines, he said, including long-distance pipelines reaching villages in remote areas.
Some of those pipelines, he recalled, stretched for nearly 200 kilometres, including towards villages along the Pakistan border.
Kailashnathan’s own official profile records his association with the establishment of Gujarat’s drinking-water pipeline grid.
For the bureaucrat, the water network was another example of the approach he associated with Modi: take a problem that appears local and build infrastructure at a scale that addresses it across a larger area.
The same approach, Kailashnathan recalled, was visible in Gujarat’s electricity reforms.
Agricultural and household consumers were initially being supplied through the same feeder system. The arrangement created problems because the needs of farmers and households were different. Agricultural supply was scheduled for a limited number of hours, while households also faced interruptions.
Kailashnathan said officials and experts were initially sceptical when the idea of separating the two systems was discussed. Modi, he recalled, did not abandon the proposal because officials said it would be difficult.
Instead, a pilot was taken up in one area. Once the experiment worked, the model was expanded.
The separation of agricultural and residential feeders later became associated with Gujarat’s Jyotigram approach, which sought to provide more reliable power to rural households while maintaining scheduled supply for agriculture.
For Kailashnathan, the episode illustrated another characteristic he saw in Modi’s style: when a proposal appeared difficult on paper, test it on the ground before deciding that it could not be done.
LG Pondicherry said there was also Kutch. He recalled Modi telling him that the largely arid region could change dramatically.
“At one point, he told me Kutch will become the Kashmir of Gujarat,” Kailashnathan recalled.
At the time, he said, the idea appeared difficult to imagine.
Kutch was known for its desert landscape and harsh conditions. Modi, according to Kailashnathan, saw the region differently as a place where infrastructure, industry, energy and connectivity could create a new economic geography.
Kailashnathan pointed to the subsequent growth of the Kutch region, including its ports, industrial activity and renewable-energy projects, as examples of how that vision was pursued.
He also recalled Modi speaking of the region’s natural resources and economic potential.
Investment was another area where Kailashnathan said Modi’s approach changed over time.
He recalled the first investment pitch in Gujarat being worth around Rs 1,200 crore. The investment summits that followed grew to a vastly larger scale, with commitments running into lakhs of crores.
The Gujarat government has held the Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors Summit every two years since 2003 as a platform for attracting investment; official Gujarat records describe the summit as an effort to showcase the state’s investment potential and accelerate domestic and foreign investment.
Kailashnathan’s recollection was less about the figures than about the change in scale.What began as an effort to persuade investors to look at Gujarat, he said, eventually became a much larger exercise in projecting the state as an investment destination.Away from roads, water, electricity and investment, Kailashnathan also remembers Modi’s personal routine.
He recalled once being asked to conduct a security audit of the Chief Minister’s residence.
Modi told him to do it when he was away on tour. On one occasion when Modi was travelling, Kailashnathan said, he entered the Chief Minister’s personal room. What he found surprised him.
There was a small prayer space, a computer with internet access, a table and chair and basic arrangements for meals. There was little else, he recalled.
It was not the room of someone who, in Kailashnathan’s telling, spent much time accumulating personal belongings.
He also recalled Modi’s limited sleeping hours, saying he had seen him function on around three-and-a-half hours of sleep.
These details, Kailashnathan said, formed part of what he saw during years of working alongside Modi, the public administrator and the person behind the office.
Kailashnathan does not describe the Modi he worked with through a single policy or project.
Instead, his recollections return repeatedly to the same pattern: a bus stop in a tribal area, a farmer trying to get milk to a dairy, a village without reliable power, a pipeline carrying water across long distances, an apparently impossible pilot project and a dry region that was being imagined differently.
“I spent 26 years with Modi and found him totally different from others. He has the will to do things and the confidence that he can do it,” he added.
