Prime Minister Modi's third term began in June 2024 with a coalition government — the BJP lost its outright parliamentary majority, governing through NDA alliance partners whose priorities do not always align with the reform agenda that India's economic trajectory requires. The political bandwidth for controversial structural reform has narrowed. Several changes anticipated for a majority third term have been deferred.

But deferral is not the same as cancellation — and India's economic ambitions cannot sustain indefinite delay. The manufacturing ramp-up that PLI requires, the foreign investment that India's infrastructure needs, and the productivity gains that a $10 trillion economy demands all depend on structural reforms that go beyond capital expenditure and incentive schemes. Three reforms stand out as both achievable within current political constraints and disproportionately impactful for India's economic trajectory.

Labour Law Implementation

India's consolidation of 44 central labour laws into four Labour Codes between 2019 and 2020 was among the most significant legislative simplifications in the country's recent history. The Codes rationalise compliance requirements, modernise definitions of employment relationships, and create a framework that treats workers and employers as partners in productivity rather than adversaries in a regulatory contest.

The Codes have not been notified. States have not passed complementary legislation. Three years after the central legislation was complete, India's labour market is governed by the same patchwork of outdated regulations that the Codes were designed to replace.

The specific provisions that matter most for manufacturing competitiveness — the thresholds above which firms require government permission to restructure their workforce, and the inspection and compliance architecture — can be operationalised through administrative notification and rule-making without requiring fresh legislation. This is the most immediately actionable reform available to the government. The political cost is manageable if the communication is right: these Codes were designed to protect workers better, not less, by bringing more employment into the formal framework.

Land Acquisition Reform

The 2013 Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Act has made large-scale industrial land assembly effectively impossible in many Indian states. Social impact assessment requirements, multi-stage consent processes, and compensation multipliers that apply even in designated industrial zones have added years and hundreds of crores of cost to projects that India's PLI and semiconductor ambitions depend on.

Several states — including Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Telangana — have passed their own modifications that streamline land acquisition for industrial use while maintaining compensation standards. The result is a patchwork in which India's industrial geography is increasingly determined by state-level regulatory arbitrage rather than by economic logic.

A national framework that standardises streamlined land acquisition procedures for Designated Industrial Areas and Notified Investment Zones — with faster timelines, single-window clearances, and transparent compensation standards — would create the land access certainty that manufacturing investors require without reopening the politically explosive broader amendment.

GST Council Modernisation

India's Goods and Services Tax has been one of the most consequential economic reforms in the country's history — unifying a fragmented indirect tax system into a single national market. But the GST Council's consensus-based decision-making architecture is becoming a bottleneck. Rate rationalisation, the inclusion of petroleum products, and the resolution of classification disputes are all being deferred by a process that requires effective unanimity among 31 states and the centre.

A modernised GST Council governance framework — with qualified majority voting for rate decisions above a defined threshold, a professional secretariat with independent analytical capacity, and a streamlined dispute resolution mechanism — would make the tax system more responsive and more capable of addressing the rate anomalies and input credit distortions that reduce manufacturing competitiveness.

None of these three reforms requires a parliamentary majority. All three require political will and administrative determination. In a coalition government with limited bandwidth, these are the reforms that deliver the highest economic return for the available political capital. The third term is half over. The window is narrowing.

The Hind covers policy, power, and strategic affairs from India's perspective. Views expressed are analytical and editorial.