Dr. Jitendra Singh Addresses 18th Civil Services Day

The popularity of Prime Minister’s Awards for Excellence has risen sharply across over 750 districts, and the competitive participation has shown a corresponding rise with applications increasing from 1,216 in 2023 to 1,588 in 2024 and 2,035 in 2025. The iGOTKarmayogi platform has onboarded more than 88 lakh officials who have accessed over 2,000 courses. Grievance redressal through CPGRAMS has expanded from around 2 lakh complaints annually in 2014 to 25–30 lakh at present, with over 95% of cases disposed of and average resolution time reduced from 60 days to about 12 days. In pension reforms, over 40 lakh pensioners used face recognition-based digital life certificates in 2024 alone, while cumulative usage across systems has reached significant scale.

These interesting figures were cited by Union Minister of State for Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Dr. Jitendra Singh while addressing the 18 Civil Services Day here, as he highlighted a shift towards “citizen-centric, institutionalised governance”, underlined reforms in service delivery and announced continued expansion of capacity-building initiatives such as Mission Karmayogi and its newer components, alongside a reoriented framework for evaluating administrative performance through competitive, programme-based benchmarks rather than individual profiling.

The Minister emphasised structural shifts in governance, including a move “from individual delivery to institutionalised delivery” and from “rule-based” to “role-based” administration. He pointed to the removal of nearly 2,000 obsolete rules, abolition of interviews for certain recruitment processes, and the redesign of Civil Services Day into a more knowledge-driven platform. The evaluation framework for excellence awards has been restructured to focus on flagship programme outcomes rather than individual officer profiles. Institutional innovations such as the Assistant Secretary programme, digital governance systems covering nearly 90% of government operations, and international collaborations, including hosting global administrative forums, were also highlighted. (UPDATED ON 21ST APRIL 2026

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