Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday said that 2014 would be remembered as a "defining year" in India's history and predicted that historians writing about the country's journey to the centenary of Independence would divide modern India into two distinct periods, before and after 2014.
Addressing a gathering at the launch of the pilot project of the PM Family Care Tracker (PM-FCT) and Health Passports in Gandhinagar, HM Shah attributed the transformation to the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in 2014 after serving as Gujarat's Chief Minister.
"2014 will be recorded as an important year in the history of this country. Twenty-five to 50 years from now, when someone writes the history leading up to 100 years of India's Independence, there will be two sections in that history: India before 2014 and India after 2014," the Home Minister said.
He said the shift became possible because the people democratically accepted a new leadership during the 2014 General Election. "This transformation became possible because of the democratic acceptance of leadership by the people. In the 2014 General Election, the people of this country elected Narendra Modi, who was then the Chief Minister of Gujarat, as the Prime Minister of India," he said.
According to HM Shah, the BJP-led Union government introduced structural changes across sectors after assuming office. "Since 2014, the central government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party has brought fundamental changes in every sector of the country.
There is hardly any sector for whose development there is no long-term, time-bound planning," he said. He said Prime Minister Modi had established "a new definition of inclusive and all-round development" by adopting a long-term approach to governance.
HM Shah said policies were framed to deliver transformational outcomes and that implementation received continuous monitoring. "In every sector, with long-term vision, policies were framed to bring transformational results. Not only were these policies created, but they were continuously monitored and implemented on the ground," he said.
The PM-FCT pilot project, launched in the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency, integrates health, nutrition, education and welfare databases to monitor beneficiaries from pregnancy through childhood and adolescence. "The initiative represented the next phase of the government's welfare delivery model by using technology to ensure that eligible beneficiaries receive services without omission," he added.