India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is putting the flagging economy back on center stage after announcing the biggest privatization drive in more than a decade and making renewed attempts to ring fence the crisis-ridden shadow banking sector.
The country is in the midst of a deepening slowdown amid waning consumption -- the bedrock of the $2.7 trillion economy. And while Modi has targeted transforming India into a $5 trillion economy by 2025, of late, most of his attention has been focused on asserting a more muscular foreign policy and placating the Hindu majority -- his main voting base -- by scrapping autonomy in India’s lone Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir.
