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India’s Prime Minister Modi should spend more time at home taking care of the country’s faltering economy and growing divide of the India people, and less time abroad telling foreigners that everything is fine in India.

Because as Modi travels from Russia to the US, meeting with the world’s powerful leaders, the Indian economy is slowing down dramatically, from 8% a couple of years ago, to 5% recently.

The Worker Population Ratio in India stands at a record low of  46.8%, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO).

Employment Rate averaged 48.76% for the period from 2012-2018, reaching an all-time high of 50.80% in 2012 and a record low of 46.80% in 2018.

The Business Expectations Index (BEI) dropped to 112.8 in the second quarter of 2019-20 fiscal year from 113.5 in the previous quarter, well below the 117.74 Index Points average for the period 2000-2019, according to Tradingeconomics.com.

Meanwhile, Consumer Confidence dropped to 95.70 Index Points in the third quarter of 2019 from 97.30 Index Points in the second quarter of 2019—well below the 103.10 Index Points for the period 2010-2019.

That’s a big difference from Modi’s early days in office, when India’s economy grew at robust rates, climbing 23 spots in the World Bank’s 2018 Ease of Doing Business ranking to the 77^th position, up from 100^thin 2017, on top of another jump of 30 spots in the 2017 ranking from 2016.

Apparently, several things must be wrong in India these days.

One of them is that Modi’s policies didn’t touch the masses. In fact, the average Indian is worse off under Modi, according to a Gallup survey, which revealed a big decline in the percentage of Indians who rate their lives positively enough to rate it as “thriving” since Modi assumed office.

Things are even worse in the rural areas.

“Beginning in 2015, rural Indians began reporting increased difficulty paying for food,” says another Gallup report. “That year, more than one in four rural Indians (28%) reported not having enough money to pay for food at some point that year (compared with 18% of urban Indians who reported the same hardship).”

Then there’s Modi’s experimentation with the country’s currency and the reigning in of the country’s central bank. And there’s his “strong fist” ruling style, which divides the country along religious and regional lines.

Modi has been running the most centralized administration India has experienced for decades, according to Ruchir Sharma, Head of Emerging Markets and Chief Global Strategist at Morgan Stanley Investments.

That’s something that hardly works in such large and diverse country.

There’s one more reason — the persistence of corruption, which is still thriving in India in all the usual places, as also discussed in a previous piece here.

Telling the world about India won’t change India. Learning from the world, especially from the US, and getting back to work at home would do it.