An open letter to the Prime Minister

Dear Prime Minister,

Every industry is sending you a birthday note this week, as you turn seventy-six. Ours comes with a small confession folded in. We are the people who sell attention for a living, the ones who build the billboards, buy the airtime and write the lines many hum without noticing. For twelve years, we have watched you do our job better than most of us. So, take this as one part thank you and one part invoice.

First, the market you grew for us. When you took office, a few hundred million Indians were online. Today it is close to a billion, and cheap data reached them before our campaigns did. UPI, Startup India and one national tax turned a scattered economy into a single market, and created the clients we now live off: fintechs, quick-commerce apps, direct-to-home labels, creators. Half the pitches on our desks are for companies that did not exist when you were sworn in. You did not just enter the media market. You made it bigger.

Then the part we find hardest to admit. You out-marketed the marketers, and you did it without really talking to us. In more than a decade as Prime Minister you have not held a single open press conference. Any brand head who tried that would be sacked by lunch. You went to the people directly instead. Mann Ki Baat put you in every kitchen once a month. In 2014 you turned yourself into a hologram and worked more than a hundred rallies in one night. Howdy Modi filled a Houston stadium, with an American President as your warm-up act. One selfie with Giorgia Meloni in Dubai, captioned Melodi, outran the climate summit it was taken at. You are now the most followed leader on earth, past a hundred million on Instagram and again on X. You did not hire the media. You became it. And Swachh Bharat, a broom and a hashtag, did what every detergent brand has chased for decades. It changed how people behave.

Now the invoice, because a letter of only praise would waste your time.

Give the outdoor industry one national law, and watch us rebuild the face of urban India. You want cities that stand next to Singapore and Dubai without flinching. See what attention, designed well, does to a skyline. Times Square and Piccadilly Circus pull people across oceans just to stand under the screens. Seoul turned a screen at COEX into a giant wave the whole world shared. Las Vegas lit up the Sphere and handed the city a new landmark overnight. Closer to the footpath, in many countries the bus shelters and public signage are built and maintained for free, paid for entirely by the right to advertise on them. The same deal is on offer here, and not only in the metros, from Delhi down to a district headquarters. Yet outdoor still carries 18% GST while the industry has asked you for 5%, and every city runs its own rulebook that treats a hoarding as a nuisance, not a landmark. One national policy, a single window to clear a site, a fair tax. Give us that, and beautification stops being a slogan and becomes a business.

On the creative economy, you have already opened your hand. Now clear the runway. This year’s budget put real weight behind the orange economy, and that is the right bet. But money is the easy part. The friction is everything that comes after it. You once turned Indian software into a global export with a simple move: build the talent, then get out of the way. Do the same for Indian stories. Make the single window you announced for film shoots actually work, one clearance to shoot across the country instead of a fresh permit in every state. And give what we sell to the world, our films, our advertising, our animation and games, the same runway that carried Indian code everywhere. Fund the talent, then remove the thirty forms standing between an idea and an audience.

And let us build Brand India where the world actually lands. You want the world to visit, to invest and to take India seriously. The first thing a visitor sees is an airport, a highway, a metro line, and it is the last thing they photograph on the way out. Dubai and Singapore worked out long ago that a gateway is a stage. Hand ours to the industry that stages things for a living, and we will make every arrival feel like the country you describe from the world’s podiums. Incredible India should not stop at a tourism logo. It should be the first hoarding off the aerobridge.

You have heavier files than ours. But this trade sells the country to itself every single day, and now it is starting to sell India to the world. Give it a friendly law and a lit-up street, and we will make the country look the way you keep describing it.

Happy birthday, Prime Minister.