New Delhi: The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) has decided against releasing the Good Governance Index (GGI) 2023, a biennial ranking of states and Union Territories across development sectors, despite referencing its release twice in the past two months.
DARPG secretary V. Srinivas said that it had cancelled the release of the GGI 2023 as the data from all the states could not be collated.
“It is a mammoth task involving 90 meetings with stakeholders in different states before the data is finally compiled. Because of the Lok Sabha and assembly elections, many of the states could not collate their data and send it,” he told ThePrint.
“And releasing the 2023 data now will make it dated. Lots of changes have happened on the ground. Many states have launched new schemes. All this would not have been reflected in the 2023 index,” he said, adding that the next edition will be released in 2025.
For instance, he said, in many states, the number of women police stations had gone up. “There have been improvements in other areas too.”
The Narendra Modi government introduced the Good Governance Index (GGI) in 2019 with the primary goal of creating a standardised tool to uniformly evaluate the impact of initiatives implemented by the Centre and the government of states and Union territories.
Next edition to be released in December 2025
In November, the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions’ 2023-2024 report had said that the third edition, GGI 2023, had been prepared and “shall be released soon”.
Then, in a statement released on 7 December, the DARPG also said that GGI 2023 will be released during the good governance week, between 19-24 December, along with the annual Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System report. The department was announcing the ‘Prashasan Gaon Ki Ore’, a nationwide campaign to redress public grievances and improve service delivery.
Srinivas said that the next edition of the index would be released in December 2025.
He highlighted that some states like Maharashtra recently released a Good Governance Index 2024 report comprising the performance of different districts of the state. “Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis released the report,” he said.
This index factors in the performance of districts based on 161 benchmarks across 10 development sectors.
Maharashtra consistently ranked second
The GGI was first published on 25 December 2019, with the Centre for Good Governance in Hyderabad as a technical partner, to commemorate the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee—observed as Good Governance Day.
It assessed over 50 indicators across 10 development sectors, which were agriculture and allied sectors; commerce and industry; human resource development; public health, public infrastructure and utilities; economic governance; social welfare and development; and judiciary & public safety, environment, and citizen-centric governance.
The second index report was released in 2021 and expanded to 58 indicators, incorporating new metrics based on feedback from the states.
Tamil Nadu topped the rankings in 2019, with Gujarat taking the lead in 2021, while Maharashtra consistently held the second position in both editions of the index.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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