A vision to give progress a boost

In public discourse, launch of new schemes or enhanced budgetary allocationsare often used as indicators of governance reforms.

- SUDHANSH PANT

However, the change ina country’s decision-making process though less obvious is much more significant. At the 50th Meeting of Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation (PRAGATI), the Prime Minister captured the spirit of the next phase of governance in threewords: ‘Reform, Perform and Transform’.

Reformmust simplify systems; performance must be judged by delivery on the groundand transformation must be measured by the real impact on people’s lives. It captures the deeper shift that India’s governance has undergone over the last decade. Through PRAGATI, a platform that has significantly changed the culture of public project delivery and scheme monitoring, India has adopted a transformative approach.

In government, every delay has a human cost. A stalled bridge is not just a line on a project chart; it is a student who travels longer hours to reach college or a patient forced to travel extra for specialised care because a hospital sanctioned remains under construction. For decades, many public projects in India remained in files and footnotes, victims of coordination failures rather than lack of intent.

Under the leadership and personalised monitoring of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, PRAGATI was initiated in 2015 with the understanding that India hadfor long struggled with delays, silos, and lack of accountability in project implementation rather than lacking plans or ambition. Bridges remained half-built, airports languished in planningand power plants stalled in litigation and coordination issues between the Centre and States remained unresolved for years, all of which resulted in projects worth lakhs of crores of rupees being trapped in procedural loops.