Blueprints of Progress: Ten State-Level Transformations in Governance
Introduction
Towards Viksit Bharat
As we cross the quarter-way mark of the present century, India’s journey towards its vision of Viksit Bharat, i.e., of transforming itself into a developed nation by 2047, has begun in earnest. “This is the period in the history of India when the country is going to take a quantum leap,” declared Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2025, emphasising how progress on such a scale would require “sabka prayas (everyone’s hard work)” and “daily targets and consistent efforts.”[1]
The collective drive of governments, businesses, and civil society is leading to expanded investments and improved results across sectors. Despite challenges, India’s real GDP grew steadily from one quarter to the next in 2025.[2] Industrial and logistics intensity are at a record high;[3] and connectivity is powering ahead, with India constructing over 5,600 km of national highways by early 2025, beating its own annual target of 5,150 km.[4]
Virtually every social and development sector is demonstrating growth, bringing benefits to millions of citizens. Indian healthcare has grown at a CAGR of 22 percent since 2016[5] and the healthcare market was projected to reach US$638 billion by the end of 2025.[6] That year, India also recorded its highest-ever foodgrain production of 357.73 million tons—a result of its strides in agriculture.[7] Education too, has witnessed extraordinary advances. The country boasts one of the world’s largest higher education systems, with over 62,000 institutions serving 42.5 million students, and an education market that could reach US$313 billion by 2030.[8]
At the same time, India has established itself as a digital powerhouse, and technological innovation is underpinning much of its growth. The smartphone revolution is changing lives, the country’s pioneering Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) model has transformed service delivery to citizens, and India leads the world in the digital payments space. Its leadership extends beyond IT-enabled services and legacy tech to frontier technologies as well, and today, India ranks third globally in AI competitiveness.[9]
Localising Development
The central government’s programmes and policies provide direction and a foundation for development. But it is India’s states that execute the ground-level actions that make effective governance, social advancement, and economic prosperity a reality. States are where a substantial part of development- and growth-related work is concentrated. The prime minister underscored this dynamic when he announced that the “vision of Viksit Bharat can be realised through Viksit States,” and that “each state, district and village should resolve to work towards a developed India.”[10] This approach is not new, and the localisation of development by states for a wider cause has been strongly in evidence since India, along with the rest of the world, adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015.
Blueprints of Progress: Ten State-Level Transformations in Governance showcases ten pioneering initiatives from various regions of India that illustrate how state governments are working to streamline governance, galvanise socio-economic growth, and boost sectoral outcomes. Each of these high-performance projects was co-designed and co-managed by a state government and one or more private actors. Six case studies were contributed by Samagra, a social enterprise that works with state governments in India on systemic transformations. Three were contributed by the Udhyam Learning Foundation; Educational Initiatives (Ei), an edtech company; and Piramal Swasthya, a subsidiary of the Piramal Foundation. One was an independent study conducted by Observer Research Foundation (ORF). Together, these case studies represent a convergence of three trends.
- Localising the SDGs
India’s impressive performance on the SDGs[11] has been a pathway to Viksit Bharat, and the mobilisation of state governments has been key to its whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach to SDG implementation. The fusion of national policy reforms with disaggregated state-level impact narratives has been widely lauded.[12] Indeed, in a global context, the Indian approach is distinctive for its emphasis on sub-national ownership and development localisation. States and districts have been placed at the centre of SDG interventions, with states being encouraged to craft their own visions and targets in alignment with global goals.[13] The SDG India Index, launched in 2018, was an additional tool for promoting state accountability and competitive federalism by tracking state-wise progress on the SDGs.[14] The cases collected in this volume exemplify state-level agency and creativity, and the process of localising development.
- Localising public-private partnerships
These cases also represent the importance of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in states. The combination of public leadership, direction, and resources with private funds and expertise has been a key to the success of Indian development projects. As the World Bank points out, India has built one of the world’s largest PPP programmes with more than 2,000 such partnerships at different stages. Most are in the areas of social, developmental, and commercial infrastructure, and operate at the state level.[15] In parallel, India is actively involving philanthropists and corporate donors in the development financing process, and this is having a demonstrable impact across states. Private philanthropy touched US$15 billion in 2023, up by 10 percent from the year before; and family philanthropy is expected to grow at an annual rate of 16 percent between 2024 and 2028.[16]
- Localising tech prowess
States are also contributing to the mission of a ‘Digital India’, and the smart use of tech is a feature of each case in this compendium. Today, nearly every state is implementing progressive information technology (IT) policies, and some have begun to lead the country’s next growth wave of IT-enabled services.[17] Autonomous state-level efforts to strengthen e-services and digital infrastructure, along with initiatives focused on digital skilling, entrepreneurship, and innovation, have become widespread.
Several other models have also evolved for states to adapt and roll out central technology programmes. For instance, the Centre might build a digital backbone which states leverage to build their own portals, services, and workflows.[18] At the same time, some central schemes are developed explicitly to let states choose their preferred operating model, based on capacity and administrative preference;[19] or are premised on the ability of states to upgrade hardware at the frontline, and to ensure that local databases are reliable and interoperable.[20]
A Framework of Principles
The cases in this volume traverse the expanse of India, from the hills of Himachal Pradesh in the north to the courts of Kerala in the south; and from Assam’s tribal districts in the northeast, across the heartland of Madhya Pradesh, to the schools of Rajasthan in the west. As these stories crisscross the country, eight principles emerge for managing transformations in governance.
- Involve communities from the outset to build trust.
Local communities must be engaged from the very inception of project planning. Their insights are crucial for designing development initiatives, and their participation builds trust, secures buy-in, and helps drive adoption. For example, in Odisha, over 4,000 farmers provided feedback and contributed to the content, design, and format of agricultural advisories meant for them—this increased their usefulness, and greatly strengthened the uptake of the state’s Krushi Samruddhi Advisory System. The widespread use of these advisories has led to improved yields and farming practices in many cases. Similarly, in Assam, the creation of a cohort of 20 local tribal women to act as a bridge between their communities and public health systems has resulted in local institutions that mainstream health priorities into their activities, and marked improvements in maternal, child, and adolescent health outcomes.
- Build multistakeholder partnerships and leverage core competencies.
At an institutional level, multistakeholder partnerships are the engine that drives the success of governance projects. Partners must be enlisted on the basis of their core competencies and the complementarity of these competencies. Broadly, state governments set the direction and ensure compliance. The private sector brings in management heft and technical and operational expertise. Civil society organisations contribute an understanding of local nuances and networks, as well as context-specific technical expertise. For instance, the creation and deployment of the Kumbh Sah‘AI’yak chatbot for the Mahakumbh 2025 in Uttar Pradesh involved a partnership between two state government entities—the Prayagraj Mela Authority and the Uttar Pradesh Development Systems Corporation (UPDESCO)—and Samagra, the Bhashini platform, EkStep Foundation, the AI venture Krutrim, Amazon Web Services, and two other tech firms that provided messaging and translation services.
- Adopt a data-driven and evidence-based approach.
Project design and execution should at all times be grounded in data and evidence. India has vigorously championed the use of data for development (D4D) in recent years, and the promotion of D4D became a rallying point of the country’s G20 presidency in 2023.[21] Every case in this volume illustrates how rigorous data collection processes shaped projects and outcomes. In Madhya Pradesh, the Udhyam Shiksha programme that seeks to instil an entrepreneurial mindset in school students routinely collects a broad spectrum of data points from students, teachers, teams, schools, and districts. This is supplemented with data of a more qualitative and evaluatory nature from teachers and programme staff. These streams combine with further data from an AI chatbot and a portal for the initiative, and all of it flows to a central dashboard to monitor various facets of implementation.
- Monitor progress continually, drawing on dashboards to determine action points.
The monitoring and evaluation of workflows within projects should be ongoing rather than occasional. The transparent presentation of metrics and activity status allows for immediate responses and corrective action. The use of online dashboards enables this process. ‘Dashboarding’ has helped transform outcomes for several projects featured in this publication. In Himachal Pradesh, efforts to deliver textbooks to state-run schools in time for the year’s academic cycles have benefited from an online dashboard showing the real-time status of textbook collection. Stakeholders can track the movement of books from depots to blocks, to village clusters, culminating with an IVRS call confirming that the books have reached the target school. Similarly, under the rollout of the NIPUN Bharat Mission in Uttar Pradesh, a live dashboard consolidates data across 30 key performance indicators, which is then used to engineer improvements to students’ learning outcomes.
- Ensure capacity building throughout a project’s lifecycle.
Human capital and skills are the foundation for development. Capacity building and upskilling must therefore be an ongoing endeavour, and should be built into a project’s design and budgets. Responding to this need, Haryana’s Antyodaya Saral initiative—which has made over 1,000 public schemes and services accessible through a common digital platform—has foregrounded capacity building through repeated training cycles for operators and officials. And Kerala’s ON Courts—India’s first “digitally native court”—has continued to run training programmes for all user groups, including judges, court staff, advocates, and advocate clerks.
- Mainstream gender considerations and promote women-led development.
Women-led development has been a pillar of India’s progress over the last decade;[22] and there is evidence to show a strong correlation between empowered women and better development outcomes.[23] State projects should thus look to build-in women’s leadership, empowerment, and inclusion wherever possible. The Karuna Fellowship programme in Assam squarely places a group of women community leaders at the centre of efforts to strengthen public health across districts. In the south, in Andhra Pradesh, the state’s Family Benefit Management System (FBMS) is supporting and empowering expectant women, among other beneficiaries. The FBMS is helping nearly 50,000 pregnant women avail of maternal health services to which they are entitled but whose benefits they had not received earlier. Its success has encouraged other expectant women to enrol on the platform.
- Offer multilingual and multi-channel access to services and content.
For public services to be accessible and inclusive, they ought to be made available through a range of channels or platforms, and in the languages best understood by target audiences. Multilingual and multi-channel access has been an important feature of a number of cases studied by the authors. Part of the reason for the popularity of the Kumbh Sah‘AI’yak chatbot was that it offered text and voice interaction in ten Indian languages and in English, and could be used via WhatsApp, a dedicated web app, the Mahakumbh mobile app, and the Kumbh Mela’s official website. In a similar vein, citizens of Haryana can apply for government schemes and services through the Antyodaya Saral online portal, at 117 state-of-the-art Saral Kendras, or through any of the more than 6,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) across the state.
- Aim to achieve quantitative and qualitative impacts.
Real-world impact is the ultimate indicator of a project’s success. Often, however, impact tends to be assessed in terms of numbers, such as beneficiaries reached or the quantum of schemes utilised. But numbers alone offer only a partial understanding—they indicate scale, but not necessarily depth. Thus, the qualitative changes wrought by an initiative, including behavioural and policy changes, are equally important.
Every case in Blueprints of Progress has achieved remarkable quantitative and qualitative gains. For example, the use of Mindspark, a tech-enabled Personalised Adaptive Learning (PAL) platform, began in 2017 as a pilot across government schools in four districts of Rajasthan. By 2024–25, Mindspark had been adopted in more than 3,700 government schools across 17 states, reaching nearly 3.2 lakh students. It had led to a 50–66-percent increase in the productivity of instructional time, compared to regular classroom time. And Mindspark users typically scored higher in Maths and Hindi (the subjects on which the platform focused) than non-users. The qualitative gains were as notable, with clearer conceptual learning among students; teachers’ increased comfort integrating lab sessions with classroom teaching; school administrators’ use of real-time data to provide more focused support; and school-level policy decisions to shift to an integrated learning model.
Finally, a common strand that runs across the following chapters is the use of technology to support governance. As Prime Minister Modi said in a recent speech, “When science is scaled, innovation becomes inclusive, and technology drives transformation.”[24] Indeed, Blueprints shows that tech deployment is never an end in itself; rather, it is the identification of the problem statement that is key. Tech is simply an enabler as states proceed to address specific challenges. This approach is foundational, and is shaping India’s progress on the SDGs and its transition to Viksit Bharat.
Read the report here.
Anirban Sarma is Director, Centre for Digital Societies, ORF.
Gaurav Goel is Founder and CEO, Samagra.
Shifali Thakkur is Chief of Staff, Samagra.
All views expressed in this publication are solely those of the authors, and do not represent the Observer Research Foundation, either in its entirety or its officials and personnel.
Endnotes
[1] “PM Participates in the Viksit Bharat Young Leaders Dialogue 2025,” PMIndia, January 12, 2025, https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/pm-participates-in-the-viksit-bharat-young-leaders-dialogue-2025/
[2] “Q3 FY 2025 GDP Grows at 6.2%; India Sees ‘Highest Growth in 12 Years’ in FY 2024 – 10 Data Points to Know,” Times of India, February 28, 2025, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/q3-fy25-gdp-grows-at-6-2-india-sees-highest-growth-in-12-years-in-fy24-top-10-data-points-to-know/articleshow/118631760.cms
[3] Twesh Mishra, “Railways Record 4.2% Higher Freight Loading in November 2025,” December 1, 2025, Economic Times, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/railways/railways-records-4-2-higher-freight-loading-in-november-2025/articleshow/125697288.cms
[4] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2117781
[5] Investment Opportunities in India’s Healthcare Sector, NITI Aayog, 2021, https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2023-02/InvestmentOpportunities_HealthcareSector.pdf
[6] “Indian Healthcare Market Projected to Reach $638 Billion by 2025,” Bajaj Finserv, November 27, 2024, https://www.bajajamc.com/sites/default/files/amcfiles/Press%20report_Indian_Healthcare_Market_projected_to_reach_%24638_billion_by_2025.pdf
[7] Neeraj Kumar, “Year-Ender 2025: India’s Agricultural Sector, Growth Governance and Ground-Level Impact,” DDNews, December 26, 2025, https://ddnews.gov.in/en/year-ender-2025-indias-agricultural-sector-growth-governance-and-ground-level-impact/
[8] “Education: Sector Overview,” Invest India, https://www.investindia.gov.in/sector/education
[9] “Which Countries Are Leading in AI?”, Stanford University Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence, https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/global-vibrancy-tool
[10] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2130983®=3&lang=2
[11] “India Making Progress towards SDGs: Report Shows,” United Nations, July 18, 2024, https://india.un.org/en/274382-india-making-progress-towards-sdgs-report-shows?
[12] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2149181®=3&lang=2
[13] Anirban Sarma, Sunaina Kumar, Vanita Sharma, eds, Global Goals, Indian Vision: The Last Mile to 2030, Reliance Foundation and Observer Research Foundation, https://www.orfonline.org/public/uploads/posts/pdf/20250924161407.pdf
[14] “SDG India: Index and Dashboard”, United Nations, NITI Aayog, and UNDP, https://sdgindiaindex.niti.gov.in/#/
[15] “About Private Investment Unit (PIU),” Department of Economic Affairs, Government of India, https://www.pppinindia.gov.in/overview#:~:text=As%20per%20the%20World%20Bank,in%20various%20stages%20of%20implementation
[16] India Philanthropy Report 2024, Bain and Company, 2024, p.12, https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2024/bain_report_india_philanthropy_report_2024.pdf
[17] “Six Indian States Leading the Next Wave of IT and ITES Growth,” Invest India, December 6, 2025, https://www.investindia.gov.in/team-india-blogs/six-indian-states-leading-next-wave-it-and-ites-growth
[18] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2162403&utm_source=chatgpt.com®=3&lang=2
[19] “Now Making an Aayushman Card Has Become Even Easier,” National Health Authority, https://beneficiary.nha.gov.in/
[20] “One Nation One Ration Card,” MyScheme, Government of India, https://www.myscheme.gov.in/schemes/onorc
[21] Anirban Sarma and Debosmita Sarkar, Using Data to Advance the 2030 Agenda: Recommendations for the G20, Think20 India, 2023, https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/T20_PB_TF2_32_Using_Data_to_advance_the_2030_agenda.pdf
[22] Rajesh Kumar Thakur, “’Women-Led Development’ Paving Way for New India: PM Modi at Mann Ki Baat,” New Indian Express, June 30, 2025, https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2025/Jun/30/women-led-development-paving-way-for-new-india-pm-modi-at-mann-ki-baat
[23] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=154585&ModuleId=3®=3&lang=1
[24] “PM Addresses the Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation Conclave 2025,” PMIndia, November 3, 2025, https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/pm-addresses-the-emerging-science-technology-and-innovation-conclave-2025/