India

The Monk Who Transformed The Most Dangerous Indian State, Into The Second Largest Economy Of India!

No personal likes or dislikes in this story, only personal experiences, facts, and pure facts.

In picture — Yogi Adityanath. **Credits**: The Economic Times

The Story I Heard in My Childhood

It was the year 2003 that one of my uncles planned to set up a plant in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The state is one of the largest in the country, and the most densely populated one. There was scope, and there was surely abundant labor available to make things possible.

His idea was to run a wax-making plant, and he had chalked out the plan with one of his friends who was a resident of Uttar Pradesh at the time.

He had hopes. High hopes that his business would flourish, and with a few thousand rupees he caught a midnight train to a small town in Uttar Pradesh, to that friend’s place.

Before he could even reach his home, he was looted in his way, most of his cash gone, he was attacked right on the train and his belongings were damaged. Thankfully, he did not lose his life.

But he didn’t want to give up even after so much damage, so they started reaching out to local politicians for help. As expected, everyone asked for bribes and money. And even after paying thousands to every local politician, there was a demand for ‘protection money’.

What was this, if you ask? You pay this as weekly cash installments to the local thugs and goons, to protect you from the other party’s thugs and goons. Sounds like a scam isn’t it? Well, that was the state of Uttar Pradesh in a nutshell, and the situation only became worse and worse as time moved forward.

My uncle tried for two years to start something but eventually lost hope and returned to his home state, which too was no good to start a business either.

The only statistics the state was shining in were related to crime and hooliganism.

Maximum murders in the country? Uttar Pradesh. Maximum thefts and looting cases? Uttar Pradesh. Maximum hooliganism? You name it, Uttar Pradesh.

The local thugs and gangs were the only ones making money while every other business failed. Women were unsafe. If you roamed outside your home in the evening, and you are a female, there are high chances that you will either be abducted, raped, or murdered.

Every political party that promised to make the state better, only made it worse by focusing on earning their own money while they were in power, and working for the public in only the last few months just before elections, to make some more false promises again.

People were tired and fed up. The politicians gained more wealth and power for themselves and their families. Children of those politicians were studying in expensive universities outside the country while kids of the local population were not even able to go to a cheap local school regularly because of lack of funds and extreme poverty.

Local schools couldn’t run properly because teachers never got their salaries, as the top-level politicians would take most of it away. Government hospitals lacked facilities because of scams at a high level.

Nothing got done and the local population had to rely upon either getting expensive private services or just waiting to die. And most of the poverty-stricken population could not even choose the former.

That was the plight of Uttar Pradesh, up until the year 2017.

Don’t believe me?

You can read the real-life accounts of people who have shared their experiences on platforms such as Quora.

In picture — Yogi Adityanath. **Credits**: The Organizer

The Monk Who Stood Up For His State

It was the year 2017 that the elections were going to be a lot different. The public was excited this time, instead of being frustrated or disinterested. People could not wait to cast their votes, all because this time, it looked like there was a bright chance that the situation of the state might change.

This time, a monk stood up for his state.

Yogi Adityanath, aka Ajay Bisht, was the face of the Chief Minister candidate for the state elections. A Chief Minister is the highest post in India on a state level, and the elections were important for the next five years because they could either transform the state into a bigger garbage dump, or it could at least clean up the existing mess and give the state a chance to flourish.

A monk was a promising candidate to at least not indulge in corruption or scams because for whom will he hoard money after all, if he has no family or relations of his own, in a worldly sense?

A monk is someone who has renounced everything that belongs to this world in a material sense. Money, luxury, big cars, big bungalows, etc. just do not appeal to them. If they want to serve the country, they will only do that most selflessly.

People, as expected, voted heavily for the party that promised to bring a change, and the monk won. Yogi Adityanath was the new Chief Minister of the state. A man with no previous accounts of corruption. A man with limited means but high values. A man who not only promised that he would not indulge in corruption but also promised that he wouldn’t allow any other man in his government to be corrupt either.

In picture — Yogi Adityanath. **Credits**: OPIndia

The Saga From 2017 Onward

There starts the story of Yogi Adityanath who commenced his career as the Chief Minister for the first time in 2017. Before that, he worked as a local elected representative of a small district, and he brought some good and positive changes there. But this time, his task was mammoth.

He was not only handed the most corrupt Indian state to work on, but also a state that was full of criminals, thugs, murderers, and extremely dangerous gangsters. He was standing alone, against an army of people who just wanted to kill him and bring back the old jungle rule into the state.

To bring stability to any state, the first step is to control gangsterism and hooliganism, to end the culture of protection money, to introduce strict laws for the safety of the general public, and also ‘show’ some examples of the consequences so that all the promises you make are not merely wordplay.

Yogi Adityanath took upon the gigantic task of transforming one of the worst-performing Indian states, and he began by slowly encountering the ruthless gangsters who had killed hundreds in their careers.

Court cases were futile. Locking them up in jails was useless because they would find a way to come out on bail, and target the Chief Minister one day. There was no way that progress and lawlessness can co-exist.

He knew it very well, that if the plight of the state has to be changed, it can only be done by ending the gangsters and establishing peace. The general public should know that the state is safe for doing business, and tourism. They won’t get shot for not paying money to a local gangster!

In his tenure, Yogi Adityanath gave a freehand and green signal to the local police to shoot the criminal at sight. Such freedom had never been provided in the past, and it led to more than 10,500 encounters in the state, thereby forcing thousands of other criminals and small-time thugs to willingly surrender at the nearest police stations, to prevent an encounter. Such surrenders and encounters made way for peace.

Uttar Pradesh became a stable state. From a state where murders, large-scale riots, bomb blasts, and rapes were a common occurrence, Uttar Pradesh became a state where not even one person died when the verdict of The Ram Temple came out!

I have written more in the story ‘How Hindus Won The Oldest & Longest Running Court Case In The World’.

Banks of Kashi. **Credits**: News18 Media

The Before And After

Now, let us look at some facts, and see where Yogi Adityanath took the state. I will share some numbers and data from 2016 (one year before he started his tenure) and 2022.

Crime against women was at an all-time high in the year 2016. There were around 38,947 rapes in the state, and in the year 2022, the number of rapes decreased only slightly to 31,982.
Murders in 2016 amounted to 4889, while in 2022 there were 3491 murders in the state, and this is the data from NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau).
Overall conviction rate of the state is at number 1, which is again an all-time high. While earlier in Uttar Pradesh, the conviction rate was less than 50%, in 2022 it was more than 70%.
If we talk about riots that subsequently led to damage or destruction to public property, there were more than 700 large-scale riots in the 2012–17 era, when another government was in power. But between 2017–22, there was not even one major riot that may have led to any kind of destruction or death.
The GDP of the state has increased from $156.3 billion to $264.6 billion from 2013 to 2022. The increase is more than 60%.
In 2016, Uttar Pradesh was ranked as the second poorest state in India. In other words, the state stood at the bottom-most rank when compared to the performance of other states. Fast forward to 2022, the state is now ranked as the second-largest economy in the country, placed right after India’s financial capital state of Maharashtra.
Not only this, while the economic growth of the state improved, it also led to an overall reduction of extreme poverty. Over 60 million people were living in extreme poverty in India before 2017. As per the statistics presented by the World Bank, India almost eliminated extreme poverty.
As per the latest news, Uttar Pradesh allocated more than $270.6 million to the local police just to control crimes, and level up against the criminals in the state.
Tourism got a major boost in the state, after the inauguration of 4 new international airports. The air traffic increased from 46k flights in 2016 to 82k flights in 2022. From just two airports (Lucknow and Varanasi) operational from 1947 to 2014, the state now has 9 operational airports out of which 5 are international. 10 more airports are proposed and will be built soon as per the data from the National Aviation Ministry.
If we talk about road travel, there was only 1 expressway in the state from the independence of the country until the Yogi government took over, and right now there are 6 expressways up and running with international-quality stopovers and toilets along the way.
From handling a footfall of around 237 million tourists, a majority of whom only knew about the Taj Mahal, while in 2022 the state witnessed more than 318 million people, which was nearly one-fifth of the total tourists visiting India!

All this, and a lot more has been achieved in just a matter of five to six years. Something that the past governments could not even do in seventy years of independence, and this is just one state.

Imagine such selfless, anti-corruption monks ruling every Indian state, hell, every state of the world, wouldn’t it just become an ideal place to live in?

Today, the scenario is that a lot of big companies have joined hands with the Yogi government to bring projects of multi-billion dollars into the state, which projects the state’s economy to go further up in the coming years.

Around 29 companies have pledged to invest more than $60.1 million in the state in the coming few years and expand from there, thereby creating more jobs in the state, boosting real estate, and flourishing local businesses.

Uttar Pradesh has only begun its journey, with the inauguration of the Ram Temple, the state is set to witness an all-time increase in tourism, revenue, and economy in the coming years.

What do you think about such tremendous achievement in such a short time frame? Comment below!

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