These are all things to be proud of. They help lay the foundation for deeper, more important, and job-creating reform. Or they would, in any government that cared less about headlines and more about the economy. Under this government, however, these series of important but largely incremental steps are being sold as a vast transformation of India’s economy – which they are most emphatically not. (It is worth noting, however, that “Transforming India” seems to have replaced “Achhe Din” as the government’s achievement marker. Wise – Acche Din was becoming a wry joke, and Transforming India, as opposed to, say, Shining India, does convey the idea of a process still in motion, that might take several terms to complete.)

Still: The “colourful booklets” (as the Press Information Bureau describes them), the non-stop tweets, the synchronised interviews with Cabinet ministers, the “Transforming India” videos, the phone subscribers inundated with unsolicited demands they download the “Transforming India” ringtone, all culminating in a five-hour extravaganza during which Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at an India Gate largely empty of people as if it were a football stadium – these come across as genuinely odd, given the context of the government’s limited ambition and achievements.

So noisy has the government’s defence of its decidedly mixed record been that the most charitable explanation is that they have missed the point.

For evidence, look no further than the recent interviews and speeches of the prime minister. In a much-scrutinised interview to TheWall Street Journal in the run-up to the two-year extravaganza, Mr Modi provided a robust defence of his failure to privatise, and to push through reform of land and labour. He said he could give “dozens” of examples of successes like the Jan-DhanYojana. In his speech at India Gate, he said that programming about his successes could fill an entire week of Doordarshan, and not just five hours. There may be, charitably put, some exaggeration involved here. A fine piece of fact-checking in the web site Scroll points out that in his India Gate speech Mr Modi said that Rs 15,000 crore had been saved through plugging leakages in LPG connections; but, in fact, the number may be under Rs 150 crore, and even the government’s Chief Economic Advisor has said that “potential savings”, not actual savings, were being calculated – a potential he estimated, in the Economic Survey, to be Rs 12,700 crore in the year. There seem to be other contradictions – just over six million new LPG connections, not 30 million; 6.6 million deleted ration cards, not 16.5 million. Some clarity would help here, as would some modesty.