Governance in 2025: Constraint, Drift, and the Burden on Institutions
By our team of in-house writers.
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First publised on 2025-12-26 06:43:21
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By our team of in-house writers.
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India's governance experience in 2025 was defined not by rupture but by restraint. The year passed without a single, unifying national crisis, yet systems across sectors operated under visible strain. A coalition government at the Centre, regulators struggling to keep pace with market expansion, and courts increasingly asked to correct executive and administrative gaps shaped the character of governance. The state functioned, but often reactively.
What emerged over the year was not policy paralysis, but a recognisable pattern of delayed decision-making, uneven enforcement, and institutional substitution - where courts and ad hoc interventions compensated for regulatory hesitation.
Coalition Politics and Cautious Governance
The most important structural fact of governance in 2025 was political. Prime Minister Narendra Modi continued in office, but without the single-party majority that had underpinned a decade of command-style governance. The BJP-led NDA remained intact, yet regional partners - most notably the Telugu Desam Party and the Janata Dal (United) - acquired tangible leverage over legislative priorities, budgetary allocations, and the pace of reform.
This altered the tempo of governance. Contentious initiatives such as the full operationalisation of labour codes, politically sensitive disinvestment proposals, and changes to centrally sponsored scheme cost-sharing were either deferred or quietly diluted. Decision-making became more consultative, but also more incremental. Stability was maintained, but at the cost of ambition. Governance in 2025 prioritised manageability over redesign.
Aviation and the Limits of Regulatory Preparedness
The civil aviation disruption in the latter half of the year offered a sharp illustration of governance under stress. Large-scale flight cancellations by IndiGo caused widespread passenger disruption and exposed capacity constraints across airports and airlines. While operational explanations were initially offered, the deeper cause lay in the enforcement of revised Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) norms by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation.
The new rules - tightening night-flying limits, mandating longer rest periods for pilots, and requiring fatigue-risk monitoring - had been under discussion for years. Their safety rationale was not in dispute. The problem lay in sequencing. Airlines, particularly those operating high-utilisation models with lean crew buffers, were unprepared to comply at scale when enforcement finally commenced.
Regulatory response compounded the difficulty. Within weeks of strict implementation, the DGCA and the civil aviation ministry issued temporary relaxations under mounting operational pressure. Pilot associations objected publicly, safety concerns were flagged, and litigation followed. The episode revealed a recurring governance weakness: long-delayed regulation, followed by hesitant enforcement once market disruption becomes visible.
Courts as Systemic Correctives
Aviation was not an isolated case. Throughout 2025, courts played an increasingly prominent role in resolving governance frictions. High courts intervened repeatedly in matters involving arbitrary insurance claim repudiations, administrative transfers, and opaque regulatory discretion. The Supreme Court of India, meanwhile, continued to hear disputes on Centre-state fiscal arrangements, executive overreach, and institutional accountability.
This judicial activism was not agenda-driven; it was corrective. Courts stepped in where executive clarity or regulatory resolve was absent. Governance thus acquired an unusual configuration: policy framed by the executive, contested in implementation, and stabilised through adjudication. The judiciary became an essential, if unintended, component of administrative balance.
Digital Governance: Expansion Without Settlement
India's digital governance architecture continued to expand through 2025. Platforms scaled rapidly, public services migrated further online, and rules under data protection and emerging AI governance frameworks were notified. Yet institutional readiness lagged behind formal expansion.
Enforcement capacity remained unclear, grievance redress mechanisms uneven, and accountability chains underdeveloped. In areas such as data protection, the absence of a fully empowered and visibly independent regulator raised early questions about credibility. Digital systems improved transactional efficiency, but did not consistently enhance transparency or trust. Where institutions were robust, digitisation worked. Where they were not, technology merely formalised opacity.
Welfare Delivery and Everyday Governance
Large welfare schemes continued to operate at scale, supported by Aadhaar-linked digital infrastructure. Direct benefit transfers functioned efficiently in stable settings, but exclusion errors persisted - particularly in districts affected by seasonal migration, documentation gaps, and weak last-mile administration.
The year also witnessed a significant structural shift in rural employment delivery with the gradual reworking of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act implementation into the G-RAM G framework, which emphasised geo-tagged assets, tighter project definitions, and enhanced gram panchayat-level responsibility. Officially positioned as an efficiency and accountability upgrade, the transition sought to reduce duplication, improve asset quality, and align employment generation more closely with local development plans.
In practice, the shift exposed familiar governance fault lines. Several states flagged delays in job card approvals, slower muster roll generation, and uneven digital readiness at the panchayat level. Where administrative capacity was strong, the new framework improved monitoring. Where it was weak, procedural rigidity increased exclusion risk. The episode underlined a broader pattern in 2025's welfare governance: reform by redesign rather than retrenchment, but with execution gaps that placed the burden of adjustment on local institutions and beneficiaries alike.
Public discontent in 2025 increasingly reflected everyday governance experience rather than ideological opposition. Complaints centred on municipal services, infrastructure maintenance, discretionary enforcement, and the growing distance between political messaging and administrative performance. Governance legitimacy was tested less by intent than by delivery.
Federalism in Abeyance
Centre-state relations remained formally cooperative but structurally tense. Fiscal dependence deepened even as political assertion increased. States pursued parallel welfare models and legal challenges, while the Centre retained agenda-setting power through funding design and conditional transfers.
The unresolved census and delimitation exercise remained a deferred but consequential issue. Coalition arithmetic discouraged open confrontation during the year, but it did not resolve the underlying federal imbalance. The questions were postponed, not settled.
The Governance Balance Sheet
By the close of 2025, India's governance system had demonstrated resilience, but limited adaptability. Institutions absorbed pressure without meaningful recalibration. Regulation lagged markets, enforcement bent under stress, and courts compensated for executive and administrative gaps.
The defining feature of the year was continuity under load. Governance did not fail, but neither did it renew itself. The lesson of 2025 is not about crisis preparedness, but about institutional anticipation. Without timely regulation, credible enforcement, and administrative accountability, governance risks becoming a sequence of corrections rather than a coherent framework.
In 2025, the burden of institutional hesitation did not fall on policy designers or political coalitions, but on regulators forced to improvise, courts asked to arbitrate routine administration, and citizens navigating systems designed to correct themselves after failure rather than prevent it.
