The BJP era was not a single story. It was a twin narrative:One where India Shined — for the billionaires, formal economy, and digital-savvy classes.And one where India Struggled — for its farmers, informal workers, job-seeking youth, and marginalised groups.

Progress, in this decade, was both real and selective. Data flowed freely. Wealth did not. Digital India connected millions. But ownership stayed with a few. Welfare was distributed. Power wasn’t. Ideology travelled faster than inclusion.

Who is the top 1%?

Big Corporates and Industrialists benefitted from:

• Aggressive privatisation drives (Air India sale, LIC IPO, BPCL divestment plans)

• Corporate tax slashed from 30% to 22% in 2019 — among the lowest in the G20

• Ease of Doing Business reforms: online clearances, single-window approvals

• PLI (Production Linked Incentive) schemes in electronics, pharma, defense

Who exactly:

• Adani Group: Unprecedented rise — from ports to airports, coal to green energy

• Reliance: Telecom dominance via Jio, retail expansion, investments in green hydrogen

• Tata Group: Air India acquisition, EV manufacturing scale-up, global buyouts

The Flip Side: Oxfam (2023) reported India’s top 1% own over 40% of the national wealth — a level of concentration that undermines both equity and democracy.

Urban upper-middle class got speed, but not a pay raise

They sold convenience that the upper-middle class did not prioritise before and took their dream to earn and own.

• Seamless digital transactions via UPI, FASTag, DigiLocker, and Aadhaar-linked services

• Better road infrastructure (Bharatmala, expressways, Gati Shakti projects)

• New tax regime (optional) with simplified slabs and lower GST on essentials

Truth in numbers

Introduced in the 2020 Budget and revised in 2023, the new tax policy with simplified slabs became optional. Meaning, taxpayers can choose between the old regime (with deductions) and the new regime (simplified).

You pay less tax if you don’t have investments or deductions (like LIC, home loan, PF). If you invest or claim deductions, the old system often saves more money.

Whom does this benefit? People who don’t rely on exemptions — mainly young urban earners or the very rich who don’t need tax-saving schemes.

Speed ≠ Salary Raise

What is real wage? It is your salary minus inflation. If your salary goes up by Rs 1,000 but prices of everything go up Rs 1,200, your real income actually falls.

As per the Economic Survey 2025, male salaried workers saw their real income drop by 6.4% since 2017–18. Female salaried workers lost even more — 12.5% decline in real income.Real income for female self-employed workers fell by 32% between 2017 and 2023. Male self-employed saw a slight increase of just 3.1%, which is less than inflation.

Credit was sold with a tap and credibility came with a cost

What once needed collateral now only needed a swipe, a tap, a “yes.”Income growth hasn’t kept pace with inflation, forcing borrowing to manage daily expenses and expectations.

RBI flagged rising unsecured lending stress, with personal loan delinquencies hitting their highest in 6 quarters (~3.6% overdue).

While urban salaried households borrowed just to stay afloat, young professionals took loans for education, lifestyle upgrades, and gadgets — often at steep interest rates.

The lower middle class turned to credit for basics like school fees, groceries, and healthcare, while contract workers, without fixed incomes, struggled to repay even the smallest dues.

Household debt rose to 43% of GDP by FY23 — highest ever.Credit card debt and personal loans grew fastest — signs of consumption borrowing.Many are now stuck in EMI traps — spending a large chunk of income repaying loans.(Source: RBI, SBI Research, Financial Times)

Despite headlines of “growth” and “infrastructure boom,” most Indians—especially salaried workers and small business owners—did not see an improvement in real income after 2018.

In fact, many got poorer when adjusted for inflation, leading to higher borrowing, lower consumption, and fragile financial health.

The middle class didn’t borrow because they were thriving — they borrowed because they were surviving in an economy where growth was visible at the top, but not felt at the bottom.

Educated, Yet Unemployed

The India Employment Report 2024 (ILO & IHD) paints a grim picture:

• Only 51.25% of Indian graduates are considered employable.

• In 2022, educated youth made up 65.7% of the total unemployed — a sharp rise from 54.2% in 2000.

• Graduate unemployment stood at ~29.1%, compared to just 3.4% among those with no formal education.

• Female graduates in states like Kerala faced up to 47% unemployment.

• Youth unemployment (15–29 years) remained stubbornly high: Urban: ~18.8% and Rural: ~13.8%.

The 2014 general elections saw the most first-time voters in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won. It defeated the Congress party — the dominant political force in India for much of its post-independence history.

The BJP’s historic victory to some extent was credited to the 2.31 crore first-time voters, who came out in large numbers to exercise their franchise.

The BJP planned, executed, and targeted the youth with carefully engineered slogans. The youth, in turn, placed their trust in a new narrative — one that offered memes over manifestos, hashtags over hard policies, and futuristic hope over present despair.

Advertised aggressively through the then-emerging social media world, this campaign created an emotional, almost cinematic bond between the “New India” dream and the first-time voter. “You are the change,” they said, and for a moment, many believed it.

The exchange was quite satisfactory for both ends: the BJP received unprecedented voter turnouts from young, urban, and aspirational Indians — defying the trends of history — and in return, thanked them with applause, sentiment, and slogans. Education and mobility had begun translating into political participation.

But what followed was a “Digital Transformation Paradox” under BJP rule.

Digital India enabled the salaried class to swipe, scan, and spend — and the billionaire class to capture, control, and compound that consumption. While it sold speed to the salaried class, it offered scale to the top 1% to build an empire.

Cashless convenience at the bottom enabled capital concentration at the top. While a chaiwala could finally accept UPI, the data from that chaiwala’s Rs 20 transaction would feed into systems optimized to serve billionaires — through lending algorithms, retail expansion plans, and consumption forecasts.

What started as empowerment became enclosure — where the digital rails were public, but the trains were privately owned. The youth who once celebrated “Startup India” began working for unicorns where real equity was out of reach, and success stories were the exception, not the ecosystem.

That same startup dream we cheered became another ladder — and most climbed only to find the ceiling. Instead of fulfilling the dreams advertised, it just made us the same old — users, voters, and workers.

Yes — BJP’s digital push created a tech-savvy middle class that could:

• Easily spend

• Track subsidies

• Access fast services

But it also created new monopolies where the top 1% corporates owned the platforms, infrastructure, data, and delivery chains.

The future was cashless — but the profits weren’t classless.

How did the Opposition respond — or didn’t

While BJP shaped its narrative through tech, speed, and emotion, most of the opposition was stuck reacting to headlines.

They questioned EVMs, protested in Parliament, occasionally went viral — but rarely offered a coherent counter-narrative. Their response to Digital India was mostly silence or suspicion. Nobody from the opposition tried to explain what was happening underneath the “swipe and go” convenience — that data wasn’t just being collected, it was being monetised without consent.

When they did speak up — about Aadhaar privacy leaks, WhatsApp surveillance, or opaque MoUs with big tech — the concerns were labelled “anti-development.” They failed to connect with the youth who genuinely believed they were part of a new India and waited for ‘Ache din’ (Good days).

In the language of generations, the opposition often came across as Baby Boomers or Gen X — clinging to legacy politics and slow rebuttals — while the BJP was speaking directly in the code of Gen Z and Gen Alpha: fast, visual, viral, and emotionally engineered.

It began with a growing discomfort — watching the line between fact and fiction blur, between journalist and influencer blur.

Just someone who noticed how easily falsehood spreads, and yet how hard it is for us to slow down and simply ask: What is the truth?

Becoming a Journalist

I wanted to be a journalist.

But when do you actually become a journalist?

There was a time when news was carved in stones or metals, read in newspapers and weeklies, heard on radio, and seen on television — each word believed by millions as the unbiased truth.

And not all could become one. It was a profession chosen by the bold and brave — those who believed the pen is mightier than the sword, who asked the right (or nearly right) difficult questions, and had the courage to write about heart-wrenching, blood-boiling facts.

The Fall of Trust

Media and journalism went from being the most trusted entity — even more than the rulers and governments — to becoming one of the least accountable institutions of our time.

Starting Truth Time

Thus began my journey of becoming a journalist.

So I started building this — article by article, check by check. Not because I had all the answers. But because I wanted a place where questions mattered again.

This is not a big operation. It’s just me. And that’s the point. No trending deadlines, no headline wars, no agenda.

Just time, research, and a quiet pursuit of what’s real.

Join the Truth Time community.

Truth isn’t owned — it’s shared, challenged, and defended together.

💬 Ask bold questions.

📩 Send leads, sources, or corrections.

🌐 Support independent, ad-free truth-seeking.

🔗 Follow & connect: Mirror | X

Because in a world of noise, your time is the rarest gift.

Truth matters, now more than ever.

We live in a world where the loudest voice often wins, a lie repeated a 1,000 times becomes the truth, where facts are outshouted, and falsehood goes viral faster than verified truths. Where technology creates faster fakes than we can verify, and truth gets lost in the endless scroll.

Truth Time doesn’t claim to fix all of that. But it works to resurface the truths buried.

This isn’t a media house. There’s no newsroom, no propaganda, no political influence, and no editor pushing a single, one‑sided ideology.

Just one person, reading, researching, and fact-checking — quietly and consistently to build a community that seeks truth.

All articles, experience, opinion pieces written here are dug into, sourced, and double-checked. No ads, no filters, just the bitter truth as-is.

Because in an age of shortcuts and synthetic truths, giving something your time might be the most radical act.

The Purpose

Truth Time verifies bold claims, asks difficult questions, and reveals what’s unseen or unheard. It blends Web3, AI, data, and old‑fashioned reading to answer one human question:

What is the truth?

Expect deep dives into what sounds true but isn’t, and calm, source‑backed breakdowns of viral claims, charts, and numbers.

How I Work

• Read widely and slowly.

• Trace claims to their original sources.

• Fact‑check dates, numbers, and quotes.

• Explain findings plainly, with links and context.

• If something’s uncertain, I’ll say so.

Are You Seeking Truth?

Truth is a hard pill to swallow. Not everyone will take it. But if you:

• feel uneasy scrolling through half‑truths,

• laugh at staged spectacles and worry about belief’s fragility, or

• are searching for an answer to a question you don’t know —

  then you’re in the right place.

Here, curiosity is stronger than cynicism.

How You Can Help

If you find value here:

• Subscribe, share posts you trust, and correct me if I’m wrong.

• Send tips, sources, or leads — I’ll follow up and credit you.

• Support long‑form work when you can (no ads, always source‑driven).

Because time spent on truth is never wasted.

— Anu Parthiban, Founder, Truth Time

Join the Truth Time community.

Truth isn’t owned — it’s shared, challenged, and defended together.

💬 Ask bold questions.

📩 Send leads, sources, or corrections.

🌐 Support independent, ad-free truth-seeking.

🔗 Follow & connect: [Mirror](https://Mirror] (https://mirror.xyz/0xf2A1a33A474C2cB60f555E51ca1e822AfFCd3aF3\)) | X

Because in a world of noise, your time is the rarest gift.