The Labyrinth of Governance Indices: India’s Reinvented Wheels
Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting to discuss the roadmap for Next-Generation Reforms! (Image Narendra Modi, X)
Effective governance demands more than novel indices; it demands memory, humility, and synthesis, making a genuine improvement.
By P SESH KUMAR
New Delhi, October 7, 2025 — The State of Governance Report by the Centre for Good Governance (CGG) conceived a detailed, context-rich model for evaluating governance in Indian states-ambitious and innovative, but illustrating India’s familiar tendency toward creating overlapping frameworks.
It merits a critical review the CGG’s approach, while also examining its utility and practicality vis-à-vis PFPI (AJNIFM, 2025) and the under-consideration IGI (IIAS, India). PFPI admittedly is limited in scope- covering only Financial Performance.
The result would most likely be a call to recognize the risks of institutional isolation and repetition, highlighting pitfalls of “reinvention of the wheel” in governance measurement while outlining an integration-focused way forward.
The approach of CGG’s governance index would appear to draw from deep constitutional ideals and decades of Indian policy experience. Eager to move beyond external molds, it delved into five core dimensions—political, legal-judicial, administrative, economic, and social-environmental—each explored via what are scores of detailed, outcome- and process-based indicators.
A standout feature is its explicit rights-based philosophy and a marked orientation toward pro-poor and gender-sensitive constructs. CCG even developed a practical tool kit as a supplement to its main report.
Using both primary perception data and robust secondary sources, the framework attempted to capture not just government outputs but lived experiences and citizen feedback. Its theoretical sophistication reflected a conscious pivot from simplistic, quantitative templates, advocating heavily for stakeholder participation and state-specific diagnostics.
The ultimate purpose was reform: actionable, granular, and democratized measurement aimed at making governance improvement a locally owned project. Amid the emergence of newer templates-like Public Financial Performance Index (PFPI) from Arun Jaitley National Institute of Financial Management (AJNIFM), laser-focused on fiscal and financial performance, and International Governance Index (IGI), shaped by IIAS’s global perspective-the effort to carve out a new niche inadvertently echoes the very silos it sought to bridge.
Despite painstaking work and learnings embedded in earlier indices, each new initiative tends to isolate itself: inventing fresh clusters and matrices, rarely referencing prior models, and often duplicating conceptual ground.
As robust as the technical intentions behind PFPI and IGI may be, this siloization results in redundant frameworks, administrative confusion, and missed opportunities for long-term comparability. Such duplication is far from academic.
State governments, faced with several indices presenting competing findings on similar governance phenomena, become selective or skeptical. Policy dialogue loses clarity; reform momentum subsides amidst methodological churn. The very mission of empirically anchored, self-improving governance becomes unwieldy and opaque.
CGG’s original insistence on integrating India’s constitutional and developmental wisdom with best international practice now stands as a critique of contemporaneous fragmentation.
Collaborative Evolution Sighting
India no longer lacks technical or institutional capacity for world-class governance measurement. But to transform from episodic, competitive frameworks to a coherent system, a shift is needed-from organizational competition to collaborative evolution. Each new measurement initiative-PFPI, IGI, or otherwise-should not start from zero or operate in splendid isolation. Instead, they must inherit, test, and thoughtfully revise what has already been built, engaging in structured knowledge transfer and inter-institutional dialogue.
Effective governance demands more than novel indices; it demands memory, humility, and synthesis, making each successive effort a genuine improvement, not a parallel experiment. Failure to synthesize past advances risks not just continued siloed work but potentially undermines the credibility and utility of governance indices themselves-ensuring that “mapping progress” remains a perpetual, incomplete journey.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
Follow The Raisina Hills on WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn
About The Author
