1. Prime Minister Narendra Modi should resist the urge to embrace the strongman-politics approach, writes Andy Mukherjee in the Bloomberg Quint, drawing a comparison with China’s Xi Jinping.
  2. Arvind Pangariya, former head of the NITI Aayog and B Venkatesh Kumar, in The Times of India lay out a path to “transfomative reform” of the Indian economy, including the insight that “young professionals, unencumbered by the compulsions of regular bureaucracy, can play a critical role in helping speed up the work of ministries and missions.”
  3. “India needs to create 20 million jobs every year for the next five years. Without that, the next election will have 80-100 million young and unemployed voters, mostly disgruntled and angry,” writes Shruti Rajagopalan in Mint.
  4. India needs jobs, and for that it needs labour-intensive industry. Santosh Mehrotra in the Hindustan Times suggests a way for the new government to think about building a larger industrial base.
  5. “Going forward, as we try to achieve rapid growth which is necessary to provide growing employment opportunities for our young work-force, we need to position our cities as drivers of the structural transformation of the Indian economy,” writes Isher Judge Ahluwalia in the Indian Express.
  6. Ramachandra Guha in the Telegraph is not so optimistic about the future: “What should worry us the most, perhaps, is the insidious recasting of the Republic of India as a Hindu State. The forces of hate and bigotry unleashed during the five years of the Modi government and further intensified during the election campaign have seeped deep into the marrow of everyday life. The traditions of pluralism so nobly nurtured by the nation’s founders have never been more fragile.”
  7. “The problem often with governments in India has been that they try to do too many things. But there is an opportunity that the new government has to do a few things, do them at an adequate scale, and do them right. That’s what India needs,” writes Vivek Kaul in Mint.

  8. In 2014, Narendra Modi tried to make a point about the neighbourhood by calling heads of all neighbouring states, including Pakistan to his swearing-in ceremony. This time around, Modi invited the leaders of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation states, effectively saying India will talk to all of its neighours – except Pakistan, writes Constantino Xavier in The Print.
  9. “Only by building attractive global cities of its own can India hope to compete with the San Franciscos and Singapores in its efforts to attract and retain intellectual and entrepreneurial talent,” writes Reihan Salam in the Atlantic.
  10. Rohit Prasad in Mint looks away from the government to its principal opponents, offering advice on what Congress needs to do to remain politically relevant.