Narendra Damodardas Modi was born on 17 September 1950 in Vadnagar, a small town in Mehsana district, Gujarat. The town is known today for its stepwell and its old monastery ruins, but in the 1950s it was simply a railway town, and it was at its railway station that a young Modi is widely reported to have helped sell tea alongside his father, a detail that has since become one of the most told parts of his biography.
Into the Sangh
Modi joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as a boy, and by his twenties had become a full time pracharak, a volunteer organiser devoting himself to the organisation's work rather than to a conventional career. That grounding in organisational discipline is often cited as the base from which his later political career was built.
Gujarat, 2001 to 2014
Modi entered electoral politics relatively late. He became Chief Minister of Gujarat in October 2001 and went on to lead the state for just over thirteen years, through four assembly election wins, before stepping down in 2014 to take up a role at the national level.
Prime Minister, three times over
Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister of India on 26 May 2014. He was re elected in 2019, and took the oath of office for a third consecutive term on 9 June 2024. Across these terms, his government is associated with the governance programmes covered elsewhere on this site, from Jan Dhan to Ayushman Bharat to Digital India.
Why NaMo Temple exists
This site, and the Bhagwan Shri Narendra Modi Mandir it describes, were proposed by people who see that journey, from a railway platform in Vadnagar to Raisina Hill, as worth marking with gratitude. The life story above is the plain record. The devotion is what this platform is built to express.