The “Gujarat Governance Model” offers several best practices which can be successfully replicated elsewhere too, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on Thursday while addressing the National Conference on Good Governance in Gandhinagar.
The minister recalled that many of the governance innovations successfully implemented at the Central level were first introduced in Gujarat under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership as Chief Minister.
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Addressing a pan-India audience of policymakers, senior bureaucrats, and governance experts, Dr Jitendra Singh praised the transformation in governance over the last decade. “This transformation did not happen overnight. Many of the reforms introduced at the national level were first tested and perfected in Gujarat, and today they are being replicated across the country,” he remarked.
He underscored the fundamental shift in governance culture under Prime Minister Modi, which has taken policymaking beyond the traditional administrative strongholds of Delhi and into various regions of the country.
He cited the PM’s directive to decentralise governance by ensuring that major policy discussions, conferences and outreach programs are held in different parts of the country and not necessarily in New Delhi. “By moving governance dialogues beyond Delhi, we are ensuring that reforms are more inclusive and reflective of the aspirations of people from all corners of the country,” he said.
The minister also referred to the evolution of India’s administrative framework, recalling how Sardar Patel envisioned a robust bureaucracy as the ‘steel frame’ of India, a vision that has been further refined through the Modi government’s approach of ‘Maximum Governance, Minimum Government.’ He pointed to landmark reforms, such as the scrapping of nearly 2,000 obsolete laws, the elimination of the requirement for attested documents, and the removal of interviews for junior-level government jobs as measures that have streamlined bureaucracy and enhanced transparency.
One of the standout examples of governance innovation, Dr Jitendra Singh noted, was Gujarat’s early implementation of the 24-hour rural electrification scheme in the early 2000s. “At a time when electricity supply was erratic across the country, Gujarat pioneered uninterrupted rural electrification, a model that was later scaled up at the national level,” he said.
Recounting the scale of transformation, Dr Jitendra Singh spoke about how electricity shortages used to be commonplace in many parts of India. “There was a time when people clapped when the lights came back on after an outage. Today, power cuts are rare, and uninterrupted electricity is an expectation, not a luxury. This is the scale of governance transformation achieved,” he remarked.
