Patna:
Old enough to vote for the first time, student Sheeba Shamim, the daughter of a middle class family, is impatient for a government that delivers jobs and hope for the future.
India has more than 10 crore registered new voters, who will cast their ballots when the world's biggest vote in this this election, which comes as the country grapples with its longest period of sub-5 per cent economic growth since the 1980s. Job growth has slowed and infrastructure projects stalled just as the biggest youth bulge the world has ever seen nears its peak in a country where more than half its 120 crore people are aged under 25.
Some 20 crore people will reach working age over the next two decades.
"I want India to become the world's biggest economy. I want my country to be at the top. If we get a perfect, strong leader, that day is not far away when we actually get there," said Shamim, a 20-year-old undergraduate in media studies at university in Patna.
Having led the country for a decade, octogenarian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is due to retire, leaving behind a Congress Party dogged by graft scandals and pilloried for its poor handling of the economy.
India needs far faster economic growth rates than the 4.9 per cent expected for the fiscal year that ends on March 31, but it also needs to reduce inflation, currently running just over 8 per cent.
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram says economic growth averaging 8 per cent is required to generate jobs for the increasing numbers of youth joining the workforce.
Semi-urban sprawl and new roads blur boundaries between villages and towns, while migration, new media, mobile phones, and of course television, mean people are more keenly aware of how the lives of others are improving faster than their own.
"Information has been democratised," said Saibal Dasgupta of the Asia Development Research Institute, a think tank in Patna.
"Aspirations have no upper limits now. Even provincial India has become aspirational."
This mood seems to favour opposition candidate Narendra Modi of the BJP who has marketed himself as the man who will kickstart the economy, bring in factories, and develop the densely populated and poor heartland states.
Critics acknowledge Mr Modi's credentials as an economic manager, but say he is autocratic and has sectarian tendencies.
Opinion polls say support for him to become India's next prime minister is at least double that of his nearest rival - the Congress party's Rahul Gandhi.
Mr Modi, 63, is even more popular among the young.
Whatever government emerges, it will almost certainly be an ideologically diverse coalition, and it will not be an easy task to create all the jobs needed.
Investment growth is set for an 11-year low, and government finances are tight, with a fiscal deficit equivalent to 4.6 per cent of gross domestic product only achieved with the help of some creative accounting.
In the past three years, India slipped from being the best to the worst in terms of improved productivity among large emerging markets. In 2013, productivity actually dropped, according to data released in January by U.S. business research group the Conference Board.
© Thomson Reuters 2014