India's half-baked reforms: Why are the results always worse than expected?

it is useful to look beyond the efforts made by the successive governments, at the outcomes and ask the question

Politicians have the luxury of choosing their performance metrics because the scope of their work is so vast. In business, shareholders buy or sell based purely on the existing or the future bottom line. The current prime metric for political performance is jobs. This may become a self-goal for the Bharatiya Janata Party, because it is a universal concern with few, near-term solutions. 

Prior to jobs, in the noughties, it was all about boosting economic growth — where again headwinds have built up. Before growth, it was about ending poverty in the 1990s. Earlier, in the late 1960s and till