By Purna Chandra Jena
A 14.1% GSDP CAGR and a joint No. 1 SDG rank are only part of the story. Compared to every previous government since 2000, and analysed sector by sector, five years of data reveal where Dhami’s Uttarakhand has genuinely excelled — and where agriculture and the hills are still lagging behind the plains.
As Chief Minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami marks five years in office this July. It is valuable to assess Uttarakhand’s performance by examining how the government has handled the conditions it inherited, rather than comparing it to an ideal standard. In July 2021, GSDP had just fallen by 5.7%, the state’s first decline since its formation; investment summits had not occurred since 2018; hill districts were rapidly losing population; and governance ranked ninth on NITI Aayog’s SDG India Index. Five years later, with a comprehensive set of current price data now available, the picture appears significantly different.
Gross State Domestic Product increased from Rs 2,54,966 crore in 2021-22 to Rs 3,78,245 crore in 2024-25 — a nominal CAGR of 14.1%, the fastest among any full chief ministerial tenure since statehood, and it represents an absolute peak rather than a pandemic rebound. Per capita income grew nearly as fast, at a 12.9% CAGR, rising from Rs 2,22,329 to Rs 3,19,896 — now 60% above India’s national average (Graph A).
Graphs A-D: GSDP & per capita income (current prices), comparative GSDP CAGR by chief ministerial tenure, sectoral GVA growth rates, and multidimensional poverty reduction. Panel E summarises the headline Dhami-era indicators.
Compared to its predecessors, this record holds strong. Uttarakhand’s GSDP CAGR averaged 11.1% under Vijay Bahuguna and Harish Rawat (2011-12 to 2016-17), then slowed to 3.7% under Trivendra Singh Rawat and Tirath Singh Rawat (2016-17 to 2020-21) as Covid struck. Only the state-formation years under ND Tiwari, BC Khanduri and Ramesh Pokhriyal “Nishank” (2000-01 to 2011-12) show a higher CAGR of 22.6% — a low-base effect typical of a newly created state, not a comparable like-for-like benchmark (Graph B). By that measure, Dhami’s 14.1% is the strongest continuous performance of any elected tenure the state has actually had time to evaluate.
The sectoral composition of that growth reveals more than the headline number (Graph C). Industry — comprising manufacturing, construction, and utilities — grew at 15.3% annually under Dhami, more than doubling its 5.9% rate over the previous decade, with manufacturing alone rising from 4.5% to 10.2%. Services saw a modest acceleration from 11.5% to 13.4%. However, agriculture slowed — from 6.9% annual growth in the previous decade to 2.9% under Dhami — even as the organic transition scheme enrolled 4.65 lakh farmers. A hill state cannot afford for its oldest sector to be the one left behind by its own investment strategy.
Poverty reveals a similar trend of slowing progress at higher levels (Graph D). Multidimensional poverty decreased from 40.38% in 2005-06 to 9.7% in 2021-22 — a decline of nearly two percentage points annually — and further to 6.92% by 2024-25, which is less than half the national rate of 14.96%. However, the rate of reduction has itself slowed to below one percentage point per year, which is mathematically expected as the base shrinks, though it also indicates that the remaining poor are the hardest to reach and that policy focus now needs to shift, rather than assuming the work is mostly complete.
None of this expansion has come at the expense of fiscal discipline, which is usually the trade-off in Indian state finance. The 2025-26 budget of Rs 1,01,175 crore, the first to surpass Rs 1 lakh crore, includes a revenue surplus of Rs 2,586 crore and a fiscal deficit of 2.9% of GSDP, within the FRBM ceiling, with capital outlay accounting for 40.7% of spending. The investment record follows a similar pattern: the December 2023 Global Investors’ Summit secured Rs 3.56 lakh crore in MoUs, of which Rs 1 lakh crore was grounded by July 2025 with over 81,000 direct jobs — a 28% conversion rate, credible by the standards of Indian summits, facilitated by a Single Window Clearance System that reduced approval time from over 90 days to less than 30.
On governance, the SDG India Index rose from 9th place in 2019 to joint first with Kerala in 2023-24, which is notable, supported by India’s first Uniform Civil Code enacted in February 2024, providing daughters with equal inheritance rights in a hill economy where women already perform 70-80% of farm labour. Tourism rebounded to a record 60.3 million visitors in 2025.
What remains unresolved is as significant as what has been achieved. The Palayan Aayog estimates approximately 1,700 abandoned hill villages and 3.07 lakh migrants between 2018 and 2022 — evidence that growth is disproportionately concentrated in the Tarai plains of Haridwar and Udham Singh Nagar, rather than in the hills the state exists to serve. The 2013 Kedarnath floods (over 6,000 dead, $3.8 billion in damage) and the 2023 Joshimath subsidence serve as reminders that Seismic Zone IV-V terrain punishes infrastructure built without slope-stability assessment as a prerequisite.
Three recommendations follow directly from this data, not from sentiment. First, reverse the agricultural slowdown: incorporate support for organic transition into a productivity-linked package for hill horticulture and dairy, rather than only relying on certification, since 2.9% growth cannot sustain hill livelihoods. Second, publish GIS investment and MSME data disaggregated by district every quarter, so the Hill Incentive tiers can be assessed—and adjusted—based on actual rupees, not just intent. Third, since poverty reduction is decelerating exactly where it is hardest, redirect the National Food Security Act and Anganwadi delivery towards the specific gram panchayats already identified by the Palayan Aayog, rather than relying on state-wide averages that may distort the overall picture.
Five years is enough to establish a trend, not to declare it permanent. The test for the next term is whether the discipline behind this growth — fiscal, investment, and administrative — can now be applied to the plains-hills gap that the numbers above make impossible to ignore.
(Jena is Economic Advisor, Advisory Support Group, Chief Minister’s Office, Government of Uttarakhand. He also works as Consultant for CHIEF — Policy and Strategy Advisors, New Delhi. Views are personal.)
