Jammu and Kashmir will soon become the first Union Territory in the country to have a district-level Good Governance Index, Union Minister of State Dr Jitendra Singh said on Sunday.

Disclosing this after receiving an update from the newly appointed Secretary of Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), Union Ministry of Personnel, V Srinivas, MoS Jitendra Singh said, "Centre will set up District Good Governance Index (DGGI) in Jammu and Kashmir and the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) will carry out this task in collaboration with the Union Territory Government. The framework of the proposed Index has been finalized with the technical support from the Centre for Good Governance (CGG) Hyderabad."

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"Jammu and Kashmir will soon become the first Union Territory in the country to have a district-level Good Governance Index," he added.

The Minister said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is keen that we should replicate in Jammu and Kashmir the same best practices of governance which are followed in other States and Union Territories of the country, reports ANI.

He said, for a long time, as a result of certain constitutional and administrative constraints, many of the Central Rules of Department of Personnel and Training and ARPG were not applicable in Jammu and Kashmir, but in the last over two years, there has been a fast-track attempt to change the work culture and to follow the Mantra of "Maximum Governance, Minimum Government", which has been the guiding principle at the Centre and States ever since the PM Modi government came in 2014.

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Good Governance Index at the district level will enable each of the 20 districts of Jammu and Kashmir to rise to the level of some of the best-administered districts of the country, with time-bound disposal of office files and other matters, increased transparency, increased accountability and increased citizen participation, said Dr Jitendra Singh.

"The next step would be to carry forward these Good Governance practices down to Tehsil and Block level," he added.

The DGGI framework has 58 Indicators drawn from different aspects of development and district administration distributed in all-encompassing 10 sectors such as Agriculture and allied sector, Commerce and Industry, Human Resource Development, Public Health, Public Infrastructure and Utilities, Economic Governance, Welfare and Development, Public Safety and Judiciary and Citizen Centric Governance.

These indicators were finalized after a series of consultations with the District officials of the Jammu and Kashmir government, Academia, Subject Specialists, etc. Looking at the availability of authentic published data and other key principles, the set of indicators have been finalized from a larger list of 135 to 58.

To compute the index and rank, the districts on their performance based on finalized 58 indicators, an elaborate exercise of data collation followed by rigorous data sanitization was undertaken. Final index computation process using standard and tested data normalization and scoring methods is underway. This would result in coming out with Division-wise and District-wise ranks of the districts. While there will be a comprehensive rank of districts based on composite 10 Sectors, the DGGI will also offer a window on the indicator-wise performance of the districts.