Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the evening of 22 May 2026 chaired the first Council of Ministers meeting of calendar year 2026 at Sushma Swaraj Bhawan in New Delhi. The marathon discussion stretched for nearly four hours and was attended by all Cabinet Ministers, Ministers of State with Independent Charge and Ministers of State. The Prime Minister set 2047, the centenary of Indian Independence, as the target year for India to become a fully developed nation under the Viksit Bharat vision and exhorted his colleagues to make Ease of Living and Ease of Doing Business the unifying organising principle for every ministry. Eight Cabinet Ministers made structured presentations to the Council on best practices, reform pipelines and citizen-feedback mechanisms drawn from their portfolios — Agriculture, Environment Forest and Climate Change, Labour and Employment, Road Transport and Highways, Corporate Affairs, External Affairs, Commerce and Industry, and Power. Mr Modi directed that files within Government must move quickly without unnecessary delays, instructed ministries to compress approval timelines and asked every department to publish a sectoral 25-year roadmap aligned to the Viksit Bharat 2047 milestones. He stressed Minimum Government Maximum Governance, mission-mode delivery of welfare schemes, deeper digitisation of regulatory clearances and saturation of the eligible-beneficiary base under flagship programmes. The PM also asked ministers to spend more time in field visits than in office files to capture ground-level pain points. The meeting concluded with a directive to the Cabinet Secretariat to circulate a unified template of deliverables and quarterly review milestones to every ministry.