Old and the new

There was a time when speaking of India’s civilisational past in policy circles invited a knowing smile, sometimes a pitying one. The fashionable view was that ancient wisdom and modern statecraft belonged to separate compartments, that the former was the province of priests and pundits while the latter required a scrubbed mind unburdened by tradition. That assumption is wearing thin. The country is discovering that a resilient future need not be built at the cost of its civilisational roots, and that scientific temper and technological ambition are not weakened by an inheritance of wisdom but strengthened by it.

The old and the new are learning to work together in India, and the results are showing. Consider what we witnessed when India hosted the G20 in 2023. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, drawn from the Maha Upanishad, was rendered for the world as One Earth, One Family, One Future. In the hands of Prime Minister Modi this was not a translated phrase placed on a logo. It was a civilisational proposition placed before the most powerful economies on the planet, a reframing of the global agenda itself. The argument was that the framework for solving climate, debt, food, and energy crises had to begin from a recognition of interconnectedness rather than transaction.

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The African Union secured permanent membership of the G20 under that very presidency, a decision shaped as much by moral argument as by realpolitik. Few diplomatic gains of recent years have been more consequential, and fewer still have been rooted so visibly in an ancient civilisational instinct. Look closer at the grassroots and the same pattern reveals itself. The Unified Payments Interface, our homegrown digital public infrastructure, processed over 22,800 crore transactions in calendar year 2025, with a daily average nearing 60 crore payments. The IMF, in its June 2025 report on retail digital payments, recognised UPI as the world’s largest fast payment system by transaction volume.

A vegetable vendor in a small town now transacts with the same fluency as a Mumbai banker. This is not the work of imported software. It is the work of a civilisation that has always understood that the small and the great occupy the same continuum, that the street vendor and the policymaker deserve equal dignity in their dealings. Antyodaya, which Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya offered as the soul of Indian governance, has slowly become its method. Each major welfare scheme of the last decade has been built around the same instinct, that the last person in the queue must be served first.

The cynic at this point shrugs and says that none of this is civilisational, that any developing country with cheap data could have done it. I want to politely disagree. The architecture of India Stack rests on the paradigm that the citizen is to be trusted, served and uplifted rather than seen as a mere beneficiary. That assumption did not arrive from an Ivy League seminar room. It drew inspiration from Tiruvalluvar, who held that the wealth of a country lies in the well-being of its weakest, and from Kautilya, who instructed in the Arthashastra that the happiness of the king lies in the happiness of his subjects.

Swami Vivekananda put it most plainly when he declared that seva and tyaga, service and renunciation, are the two national ideals of India, the soil from which everything else in our public life must grow. Without that civilisational substrate, the same technology elsewhere has produced surveillance states. Here it has produced inclusion at a scale historians will study for a long time. The renaming of the Prime Minister’s official residence as Seva Teerth, a pilgrimage of service, with the byline Nagarik Devo Bhava, the citizen is divine, captures this spirit in action. A pilgrimage site is not a place of power.

It is a place where one goes to give, to surrender, to serve. To rename the highest office of the executive in this manner is to make a civilisational declaration. Vivekananda, who walked across this land and who insisted that the only religion he could preach was service to the poor whom he called daridra narayana, would have recognised the spirit of that gesture. The same instinct shapes the framework of Jan Bhagidari, people’s participation, that has come to define governance over the past decade. From Swachh Bharat to Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, from millet awareness to Catch the Rain, the citizen has been treated not as a passive recipient of state delivery but as a co-creator of public outcomes.

Citizen centric governance is no longer a textbook phrase. It is a working method. The revival of Nalanda University at Rajgir in June 2024 sharpened this conversation further. The original Nalanda, founded in 427 CE by Kumaragupta I of the Gupta dynasty, flourished for nearly 800 years, drew scholars from China, Tibet, Korea, Persia and across Asia, and was reduced to ashes by the invader Bakhtiyar Khilji at the close of the twelfth century. When the new campus opened with students from over twenty countries already on its rolls, it was not nostalgia speaking.

It was the rebuilding of a node in a knowledge network that had once made Asia luminous. The Prime Minister said on that occasion that the meaning of Nalanda is the continuous flow of knowledge and education. The same hands that built Nalanda are now building twenty-three IITs, twenty-two AIIMS, the National Education Policy and an Ayurgenomics research stream that applies modern genomics to ancient Ayurvedic classifications of human constitution. It is continuity and not a contradiction. The perpetual cynic insists that civilisational rootedness is a polite way of saying we want to go backward. The numbers tell their own story. India’s installed solar capacity, a modest 2.82 GW in 2014, had crossed 130 GW by October 2025, with total renewable capacity now over 270 GW.

The International Solar Alliance, launched by India and France at Paris in 2015 and headquartered at Gurugram, today has over 120 signatories working to mobilise a trillion dollars of solar investment by 2030. Mission LiFE asks the ordinary citizen to consume with care rather than carelessness. The instinct behind it is not new. The Isha Upanishad gave us its plainest formulation thousands of years ago, tena tyaktena bhunjithah, enjoy by renouncing. A country that had ignored its civilisational wisdom would have copied the West’s consumption pattern and sped up the planet’s distress. India is doing the opposite, and quietly so. There is also the matter of the citizen and the state.

The civilisational instinct in our soil has always understood that governance is a sacred trust. Sukhasya moolam dharma, dharmasya moolam artha, arthasya moolam rajyam, the verse cited at the launch of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana in 2014, captures this completely. Happiness rests on dharma, dharma rests on economic activity, and economic activity rests on the responsibility of the state. Over fifty crore bank accounts later, the verse has become a balance sheet. Ujjwala has lit kitchens, Ayushman Bharat has covered medical bills, PM Awas has put roofs over heads.

Each of these carries within it the idea of seva, or service rendered without expectation. The dangers of ignoring civilisational wisdom are not abstract. We have seen them in the rootlessness of policy elsewhere, in nations of immense wealth that cannot bind their citizens together, in technological prowess unmoored from any sense of purpose. A society that forgets where it came from will not know what to do with what it has built.

India is choosing differently. Tribal communities in the Western Ghats, with whom I have spent over four decades, taught me long ago that the tree that knows its own roots is also the one that grows tallest. The Modi years have understood this instruction with quiet clarity. They have watered the roots, and the branches are now reaching into the sky. That is the balance the cynic missed. India is not going backward. India is finally walking on both its feet.

(The writer serves as Member, NITI Aayog, Government of India, and is the founder of the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM) and the Grassroots Research and Advocacy Movement (GRAAM). The views expressed are personal)