All opinion polls should be treated with caution. The findings should not be interpreted as the final verdict on the issue that is being polled or surveyed.

Yet they should not be completely ignored as they do serve a useful purpose. They provide a reasonable indication of the broad opinion on the matter that is being polled.

An opinion poll by Business Standard among some chief executives of top Indian companies on what they thought of the first six months of the Narendra Modi government has thrown up some interesting results, even after you take into account the caveats mentioned earlier.

One, industry leaders were not as gushing with praise for the government of Mr Modi as would have been expected.

True, about a fifth of the chief executives polled gave Mr Modi 90 per cent marks on his overall performance, but the average score was a little less at around 70 per cent.

This would mean the remaining four-fifths of the respondents gave him a much lower score to bring the average down.

Rating the Modi government's economic policies, the chief executives were even less jubilant. The average score came down to 66 per cent. And almost 40 per cent of them felt that the Modi government's biggest weakness in the last six months was its slow pace of economic reforms.