Page 13 - GGI_FINAL_18.12.2019

Executive Summary

India is a union of States with a constitutional distribution of powers between the Centre and
the State Governments. States have played a key role in the growth and development of the
country since its independence. To a large extent, States across the country have similar
institutional structures and practices in terms of administrative structures and delivering
services in general and governance in particular to the citizen. However, in spite of these
commonalities, there have been variations in the progress among the States even after
accounting for the diversity that makes our country.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in the spirit of federalism, especially co-operative
federalism. In the interest of furthering this spirit, the Government of India constituted a
Group of Secretaries (GoS) on Governance who recommended developing of an index
to gauge the performance of the States. The Department of Administration Reforms and
Public Grievances (DARPG), Government of India with Centre for Good Governance (CGG),
Hyderabad as its technical partner took lead to prepare the Good Governance Index (GGI).
The framework of GGI aims to put forth a comprehensive means of computing an index to
measure the state of governance across States and UTs and rank them accordingly. The
intent of the index is to provide information for the State Governments to act on and improve
upon and it also to provide some insights to Central Ministries and Departments.

The GGI framework conceptualises and builds upon the fact that good governance acts
as a means to effective delivery of essential services such as education, healthcare,
environment protection; enabling economic growth and development in sectors such as
agriculture, industry; and access to legal protection and judicial services, thereby, covering
major components of what constitutes governance.

Several existing national and international indices were thoroughly studied to understand
their constitution to avoid reinventing the wheel and arrive at what has and has not worked
in the past. Consultations with different stakeholders and review of relevant literature have
been crucial in identifying sectors and indicators to compose the index. The knowledge
of indices, along with iterative consultations with different stakeholders including GoS on
Governance resulted in the following guiding principles for selecting the indicators:

• Simple and measurable
• Output and outcome oriented
• Data and applicability across States and UTs
• Time-series and authentic State-wise database