India lost several years to “administrative inertia”, and files for key infrastructure projects kept moving from one office to another, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Tuesday as he criticised the UPA era that preceded his term.The Prime Minister addressed a gathering in Vadodara after inaugurating key sections of the Dedicated Freight Corridor in the country’s western part. He said the 2,800-km project was now complete.He then turned to the young faces, now the government’s key focus, and said if the NDA government moved at the UPA’s pace, the freight corridor would not have been completed in their lifetime. He then said India now faces a race against time and must prepare for the changes Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bringing.Among the 6,000-strong crowd were college students, Gujarat ministers, MLAs, party leaders and social media influencers. After laying foundation stones and inaugurating projects worth thousands of crores, the Prime Minister said the freight corridor’s completion is “a highly historic achievement for India of the 21st century”. He said the idea of a dedicated freight corridor to streamline cargo movement across the country was conceived in 2004; a dedicated company was set up in 2006 to execute it, but little happened for years.“Until 2014, the files simply kept moving from one place to another. The files themselves were travelling across tables… And look at the misfortune, even these files were not fortunate enough to get a dedicated corridor,” he said. Prime Minister Modi said the earlier government’s approach was such that “not even one kilometre of the Freight Corridor work could be completed” in seven or eight years. Describing the state of the project files during this time, he used the Hindi phrase, “atakti, latakti, bhatakti” – meaning, ‘stuck, hanging and lost’.PM’s fresh youth outreachAddressing the younger faces in the audience, the Prime Minister said, “If the country had continued to function according to their (UPA’s) way of working, who knows, even three or four generations after you might have come and gone, and this project would not have been completed.”He then cited figures to underline the corridor’s impact: more than 430 freight trains now run daily on the two corridors; a 100-kilometre stretch that a freight train took six and a half hours to cover can now be covered in less than half that time; the distance a truck took roughly 30 hours to cover can now be done in 10 to 12 hours. He noted that goods equivalent to the load carried by more than 250 trucks were recently moved in a double-stack container train from JNPT Port in Mumbai to Vadodara. He joked that “naaraaz fufajis” (angry uncles) had now found a job: “criticise, question and worry about livelihoods truck drivers would lose”.Story continues below this ad“Naaraaz Fufaji” is a term the Prime Minister used in his recent address at Delhi’s Shri Ram College of Commerce and is part of the BJP’s new approach to woo the Gen Z in the aftermath of youth protests in various parts of the country. The PM’s message to the youth is clear: they were too young to know the crises that gripped the country before the BJP’s rule; his tenure as Prime Minister brought better governance, and those critical of him were naysayers and out of sync with the youngsters.Reaching out to the youth amid the nationwide uproar over paper leaks, he said the government would ensure free online coaching for students preparing for competitive examinations and that these classes would be delivered by “some of the best teachers in India”. The goal, he said, is to ease the financial burden coaching fees place on middle-class families.PM’s AI PushThe Prime Minister then spoke about AI, another subject he has been speaking frequently on. “We want the coming generation of our young people to be prepared for AI… If we want to become a superpower before the world in AI, then the country will also have to prepare for it and build its ecosystem,” Modi said, emphasising that India’s ambitions in artificial intelligence would require far more than software engineers and IT companies.”The Prime Minister urged the youth to understand that AI skills are not confined to the technology sector alone. A person equipped with the right skills “can develop new AI solutions for agriculture, create technology for the healthcare sector, improve productivity in manufacturing, or launch a startup in robotics”, he said.Story continues below this ad“The coming era will see every modern sector run on electricity and depend on an electric ecosystem… semiconductor manufacturing, data centres and AI-linked industries are sectors for which electricity was lifeblood,” he said.The Prime Minister said that is why India is working simultaneously “across solar, wind, hydropower and nuclear energy, while entering into agreements with other countries for uranium, critical minerals and rare-earth minerals”. “All this effort is being made day and night for the future of the country’s youth,” he said.The Prime Minister referred to Vadodara’s industrial identity, saying that the city had demonstrated for nearly 150 years how “education, skills and industry” could come together. “A journey that began with textiles and tiles later expanded into oil and petrochemicals… Vadodara emerged as a major MSME hub over the past two to two-and-a-half decades. Today, look at how dramatically things have changed… India’s first Made-in-India military transport aircraft, the first flight of the C-295 aircraft has taken to the skies from here,” he said.During his Vadodara visit, Prime Minister Modi inaugurated, laid foundation stones for and flagged off projects worth over Rs 35,200 crore, with railway work forming the largest component. These included development projects worth more than Rs 30,766 crore under Railways, including the completion and inauguration of three sections of the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor, a key milestone in the corridor’s development. Modi also inaugurated gauge conversion and doubling work on other railway routes and flagged off a new Vadodara–Tanda Road passenger train and a freight train.