14/08/2026
Every major governance reform starts with a specific observation on the ground. This one started in Gadchiroli.
During field visits there in May and June, across villages in Bhamragad, Chamorshi, Aheri, Etapalli, Mulchera and Sironcha, a pattern showed up again and again. A family excluded from a dozen scheme benefits was usually missing one document, not twelve. Budget allocations do not fix that. Portals do not fix that. What fixes it is removing the document requirement itself, or fetching it from data the government already holds.
That observation fed directly into the state-level Government Process Re-engineering (GPR) initiative under leadership of Hon. Chief Secretary Rajesh Aggrawal Sir which was presented at a workshop in Mantralaya this week, jointly organised by the Office of the Chief Secretary and the Planning Department.
Rishikesh Shirke and I are part of this from the Office of the Chief Secretary. We are now going department by department, reviewing every scheme, whether it sits under the Plan or under the DPDC, and turning the Gadchiroli findings into specific changes. Auto-fetch of data already held by government, so citizens stop being asked for what the state already knows. Documentation cut at the source rather than reviewed after the fact.
The scope goes beyond citizen-facing application forms. We are also pushing changes into the type plans (the standard design templates for infrastructure works) that govern infrastructure schemes themselves. As one example, we have proposed that a plantation plan be made a compulsory part of the type plan for relevant infrastructure works, built into the design stage rather than added on as an afterthought.
The goal across every scheme/ service we touch is the same: minimal, and eventually near-zero, documentation for both the application and the service delivery that follows.
It is early days. But once this rolls out statewide, citizens should start to feel the same shift we saw the district administration deliver in Gadchiroli, at scale.
Gadchiroli field finding leads to state GPR reform.
