Business Today talks to Gaurav Bhardwaj of IIM-Shillong, on what should be the new government's agenda -

The BJP, led by prime ministerial front-runner Modi, promised in its election manifesto to adopt a low-cost housing policy that would ensure every family in India has a home by 2022. It aims to make land more easily available to developers, and to provide them with incentives to build cheaper homes.

Sunil Prasad, secretary general of Brussels-based Europe India Chamber of Commerce (EICC), said investors in Europe and other parts of the world are bullish on India despite recent slowdown in growth as fundamentals of the economy remain strong.

Jairam Ramesh, a union minister and senior Congress leader, criticised opposition leader Narendra Modi for blocking the general services tax (GST), which is aimed at easing doing business, raising revenues and boosting growth.

\"Issues that had been settled were reopened. The consensus reached on the draft of the Constitution Amendment Bill was broken and work on the GST bill was interrupted,\" finance minister Chidambaram said.

India is trying to modernise its front-end retail sector. But with entry barriers to FDI being raised by political parties, it seems the country has taken two steps backward after a step forward.

Business houses in the US, the UK and other parts of European Union are happy with the prospects of Modi winning the polls. They have concerns about his unproven secular credentials, but are quick to add that if he comes to power, he would be accountable to the people and constitutional institutions.

One of the main reasons is the dominance of caste, religion and identity-based politics in the state. Muslims, for instance, have typically voted for Mulayam Singh Yadav's SP or the Congress while the backward castes have supported Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party BSP and the BJP has traditionally relied on the upper castes.

The United States urged the Indian government that emerges from ongoing elections to follow economic policies that encourage investment, saying Washington would like to see bilateral trade grow to $500 billion a year.

Arun Jaitley is a senior leader of the BJP, hot favourite to form a government after the elections. He says he wants the government that takes office next month to approve five big-ticket investments quickly to signal it means business.

Should Modi win the elections, his government will face its first credibility test with markets when he delivers a budget by June or July that will need to show the country can realistically contain its fiscal deficit.

Political analysts believe that power shortage has become a major electoral issue not only in this state but across the country. Modi's spiel, frequently mentioning Gujarat's power achievement, is finding resonance among voters in most states.

Five corporate bigwigs who have entered electoral politics unveil well-crafted, high-voltage campaigns.

Top party sources told Business Today that the poll document would be released either on April 7 or 8. This is perhaps for the first time a national party is releasing its manifesto after polling has already begun

\"We disagree with the consensus that elections can revive the investment cycle,\" economists at Credit Suisse said, adding that \"such misplaced optimism ignores the realities of the business cycle and overestimates the power of the central government\".

Releasing the party manifesto on Wednesday (March 26) for the forthcoming Lok Sabha election, Congress President Sonia Gandhi affirmed that the aspirations of party's vice president, Rahul Gandhi were reflected in the 50-page document.

BJP has put jobs and urbanisation at the centre of its policy pitch as it seeks to oust the Congress-led government in a general election starting on April 7, two party sources told Reuters.

In the past year, an increasing number of students from business schools to engineering and medical colleges have signed up to intern with the country's biggest political parties as they work on their strategies and draft their manifestos.

Empathy is a trait in the Gandhi scion that stands out strongly in his years in public life, but little else in the persona of Rahul, the politician, is clear. Rahul's ad blitz has been written off already by brand experts as half-thought out, irrelevant, disjointed and late in its build-up.

AAP's economic thinking is influenced by both left-wing and centre-right ideology, among other schools of thought. The heart of AAP's economic policy will lie in vesting crucial decision making in to the hands of the common man.