Distinguished public service leaders, honorable ministers, officers, colleagues, very warm welcome to the hundred and sixth summit being organized today in New Delhi at the India habitat center. It's a privilege to be here with all of you. And what I am presenting today is not just another report. It is an assessment based on primary research and outcomes, a decadal analysis or evidence based reflection of India's governance story, assessment of governance outcomes based on primary research and field evaluations across India. At SKOCH, we have evaluated thousands of projects, not on intent, not on expenditure, but on impact on citizens.

And this presentations captures what has worked, where it has worked, and most importantly, why it has worked because governance today is no longer about schemes. It is about measurable outcomes on the ground. Let me begin with a simple question, which states have consistently delivered not for one year, not for one flagship scheme, but over a sustained period of time About one good year or one flagship scheme. This is about sustained governance performance over a decade because governance is not about isolated success, ladies and gentlemen. It is about consistency of outcomes.

So if we look at a year wise analysis of top performing states, if you look at a decade long trajectory, different states emerge in different years. But the key insight, ladies and gentlemen, comes from repetition. And as this slide show, Gujarat appears in this list three times. Andhra Pradesh appears twice. Most states appear only once.

This clearly indicates that sustained governance and governance performance is a function of good governance and good governance is not accidental. It is built on systems. Governance excellence, therefore, may be replicable, but it is not accidental. States that perform repeatedly have some form of, continued continuity, strong monitoring frameworks, and most importantly ownership at the last mile till the leadership level. And this is the real differentiator to our minds and not simply budgets.

So if we look at the cumulative rankings between 2014 to 2024, we asked one more important questions over ten years, who really stands out, right? And when we aggregate performance over ten years, the differences become sharper. You can see from the chart on the subsequent slide, which I will get to in a minute, that the top states are not just marginally ahead. They are significantly ahead in cumulative scores. This gap reflects structural capability, not short term performance.

And this cumulative ranking that we are now about to present removes noise. It removes one off successes and it removes short term spikes. What remains therefore is structural governance capability, and that is what we should be benchmarking against when we aggregate performance over ten years, the differences therefore become sharper. Now this slide ladies and gentlemen is extremely important because it compares two periods of 2014 to 2019 and the period of 2020 to 2024. And what we observe is some states have accelerated, some states have plateaued, and some states have grown at a declining pace.

And this is where policy execution meets reality. The key insight here is that reform momentum is not self sustaining. It requires administrative focus. And if administrative focus weakens, even strong states may slip. We had the benefit to Sri Sameer Kochhar this morning.

He said, Gujarat Gujarat became a laboratory for Viksit Bharat. Bureaucracy active thi, is slide mein kya dik nikum milta hai states that have invested in digital governance, in district level accountability and outcome tracking have actively improved post 2020. So the question for all of us is, are we being able to institutionalize governance? Now move from states, ladies and gentlemen, to what is happening within a state. Let us look at sectors because governance ultimately plays out through sectors over the course of the past decade, we analyzed thousands of projects across domains, and we asked what is, and where is governance actually delivering impact?

The top 10 sectors, ladies and gentlemen, in governance range from district governance to municipal governance to e governance, police and safety and health. And these account for a scantily high share of high performing projects. You can see that district and municipal governance together form a large proportion of the total impact. This tells us that governance improvements are happening at the last mile. And another key insight is that e governance has one of the highest representations amongst top performing sectors reinforcing that digitization is now central to outcomes, which means that the real shift in India's governance is happening at the implementer and not policy announcements.

We will now, ladies and gentlemen, be looking at the governance categories that are report maps. We classified governance into multiple categories to understand performance more deeply. These categories span all major domains agriculture, health, urban development, infrastructure, welfare, and And as the subsequent slide will indicate, the distribution of projects across categories is quite broad, showing that innovation is happening across sectors, not just in areas. And more importantly, each category requires different administrative capabilities. So a state may perform well in one area and still lag in another, which is why granular and three sixty evaluation becomes critical.

So if we look at the full spectrum of governance sectors, ladies and gentlemen, this is the full universe of sectors that we evaluate. We evaluate governance across more than 30 sectors. This visual shows the breadth of the coverage from core infrastructure to sectors to administrative reforms. And this reinforces one core point. Government governance is no longer sector specific.

It is interconnected because governance is becoming increasingly interconnected. For instance, agriculture depends on irrigation, finance, logistics. Health depends on sanitation, water and infrastructure. Urban development depends on governance capacity. So we cannot work in silos anymore.

And this is a key learning that SKOCH group has had since 1997. The future of therefore is convergence. Let me now briefly explain how we arrive at these findings, ladies and gentlemen. Our methodology is rigorous and multilayered. Dr Gursharan Dhanjal will be explaining it in greater depth during his presentation. Projects, once submitted by states, undergo rigorous analytical screening. They go through domain expert evaluation followed by peer review and field validation, and we also incorporate citizen feedback, outcome assessment, and measurable impact. Only a small portion of total submissions make it to the final stages, the threshold. The academic threshold for acceptance, therefore, is rather high.

This governance assessment captures ground level truth. And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, these rankings hold. And with that, we thank you very much. Let me leave you with one thought. India does not lack good policies, ladies and gentlemen.

What differentiates states today is execution, discipline, and execution discipline comes from measurement, accountability, and leadership commitment. And the data we present presented today is not a conclusion. It is a starting point for future action, and we urge you to participate in this action oriented progress report. Thank you very much.