Abstract:

To overcome the issue of horizontal imbalance, persisting largely across and within the states in India, and to promote the spirit of competitive & cooperative federalism, the NITI Aayog has initiated ‘Transformation of Aspirational Districts’ Programme (ADP) since April 2018. The objective of this programme is to monitor the real-time progress of these Aspirational Districts based on 49 indicators from 5 identified thematic areas. After four years of implementation of ADP, assessment of the given themes of selected districts has happened in 2022. This paper gets divided into two sections. The First section focuses on details of ADP and its themes and their assessment (delta ranking), etc. In the second section of this paper, researchers have chosen Maharashtra State, and the selected districts to study and analyse the process of assessment of these districts based on Five ADP themes. Here, baseline scores and rankings of the districts in 2018 and composite scores and rankings in 2022 are majorly taken up to comment on the districts’ performance on selected parameters. Researchers have extensively used secondary data sheets for this analysis and few formal as well as informal interactions with the ADP stakeholders

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