He recalled his own childhood in “a village without a doctor or a teacher, no hospital, no school, no electricity” and said: “Of the many challenges we face the most important is to empower every citizen with the light of education. I say this with the deepest conviction because I know what education did for me.”

The Prime Minister cautioned on the challenges of growth. “Today’s youth, born in the 1980s and later, would have no memory of the kind of corruption that the regime of controls and permits had created. To get a railway ticket or a telephone connection you had to bribe someone... However, even as the creative energies of our people have been unleashed and old forms of corruption have vanished, new forms of corruption have emerged which need to be tackled.”