This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 19th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For good or ill, India's new Prime Minister is not yet the reformer he was promised to be.

Swami I. R. a research fellow at the Cato Institute and columnist at the Times of India

evaluates the short tenure of Norengra Modi.

Prime Minister Modi had a lot of expectations sort of heaped upon him

before his election and after his election what has been the result?

I would say he has disappointed both his critics and his admirers.

The critics said oh my God he'll be another Hitler he'll be another King Kong, he's going to be terrible

for the Muslims and minorities.

And in fact, nothing much has happened. Radical reformers thought, he's going to change the whole economic system,

he's going to take tough decisions, he's going to liberalize sectors,

he's done none of that either.

Astonishingly for a man who was elected on the basis apparently that he'd bring about a huge amount of change, for good or for bad.

His first hundred days have been marked, I would say above all, by continuity, an unwillingness

to take any radical steps of very kind.

GDP growth had been moving along very briskly until fairly recently.

Well, it's been decreasing for three years.

That is what led to the outside of the last government.

And Modi faces deep structural problems which he cannot overcome overnight.

He is trying to tackle them one by one.

What turned out was that even when you cleared trillions of dollars worth of projects, nothing happened.

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