India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi is prone to win a rare third consecutive term in office, with local polls on Saturday suggesting his Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition will win a parliamentary majority.
According to a poll by local news channel NDTV, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is anticipated to secure around 365 of the 543 seats within the House of Commons. The party or coalition that receives no less than 272 votes will form the federal government. The final results, expected on Tuesday, may differ from the post-election poll forecasts.
If the exit polls, whose results are relatively patchy, are confirmed, Modi will serve one other five years because the country's prime minister – a position he has held since 2014.
The Indian election, the world's largest democratic election by which nearly a billion eligible voters participated, took place in seven phases over the past six weeks, starting on April 19. There are a complete of 543 contested seats within the lower house, and the party or coalition that receives no less than 272 votes will form the federal government.
Under Modi’s ten-year rule, India experienced robust economic growth and a leap in its global status. India, which is home to 1.4 billion people, has one among the fastest growing economies on the planet, growing by 7.2% within the 2022-2023 financial 12 months, exceeding the second highest growth rate among the many G20 countries. The Projects of the International Monetary Fund that India’s economy will grow by 6.8% in 2024 and 6.5% in 2025, in comparison with China is forecast to grow by 5% in 2024 and 4.5% in 2025.
Some economists are much more optimistic. “The bigger you get, the harder it is to sustain a very high level of growth, but I think 7-7.5 percent growth is possible,” Sujan Hajra, chief economist at Anand Rathi Share and Stock Brokers, told CNBC, adding that improving infrastructure might be a giant priority to spice up growth.
“Soft infrastructure, such as improving the country's health network, will be given much more emphasis this time than hard infrastructure because a lot of work has already been done here,” Harja said.
In the BJP is clearly For the approaching term, Modi promised that his government would make India one among the world's three largest economies, aggressively fight poverty, open up recent avenues for growth and fight corruption.
Despite international politicians' optimism about India's growth trajectory under Modi's rule, observers and critics warn that the prime minister's third term could bring further signs of democratic backsliding. He has also been accused of hate speech for calling Muslims “infiltrators”” at a rally a few days after the election began. The religious divide in India remained a hot topic during the election, as did unemployment.
According to a survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, unemployment was the biggest concern for 27 percent of the 10,000 respondents. More than half (62 percent) of respondents also said that it had become more difficult to find a job in the last five years during Modi's second term.
Modes According to reports In March, he said he was confident the BJP and the broader National Democratic Alliance would win a combined 400 seats, but analysts say that’s unlikely to matter much so long as he stays near the 303 seats he won in 2019.
“The outlook for the Indian equity market is nevertheless very positive as we have seen the kind of progress and efficiency it has been able to achieve from a governance perspective since 2019 with 303 seats,” said Malcolm Dorson, senior portfolio manager and head of emerging markets strategy at Global X ETFs.
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