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The Union Government is preparing 'Reform Utsav', a three-month campaign beginning in October 2026 to collect citizens' suggestions and convert them into governance reforms.
Cabinet Secretary T.V. Somanathan, who heads its coordination committee, held a video conference with the Chief Secretaries of all States on 10 August 2026 to set it up.
The campaign runs in phases - Jan Manthan to discover suggestions, Vimarsh to deliberate, and Samadhan and Sankalp Siddhi to deliver and track reforms.
Artificial intelligence will be used to classify citizen submissions, with a multilingual call centre proposed to widen access.
Most citizen-government interaction is transactional: a person applies for a benefit, a licence or a certificate and the state delivers or refuses it. Participatory governance treats the citizen instead as a source of information about how the system itself should change - which rule is redundant, which form asks for the same document twice, which approval takes six visits. The design challenge is not collecting opinions but converting them: without a mechanism that deliberates, prioritises and tracks, mass consultation produces a large pile of suggestions and no reform. Reform Utsav's phase structure, with a named coordination authority and periodic review, is an attempt to close that loop.
Simple Analogy: A suggestion box changes nothing on its own; someone has to open it on a schedule, sort it, act, and report back.
GS Paper 2 > Governance > Government policies and interventions, transparency and accountability, e-governance; GS Paper 4 > Responsiveness and citizen-centric administration
General Awareness > Current Affairs > Government initiatives
General Awareness > National Current Affairs
Local self-government can be best explained as an exercise in
Answer: Democratic decentralisation
The discovery phase of Reform Utsav, in which citizens submit reform suggestions through a portal and outreach events.
The deliberation phase, which sorts suggestions into quick wins and structural reforms needing a roadmap.
The senior-most civil servant of the Union Government and head of the Civil Services Board; T.V. Somanathan holds the post and heads this campaign's coordination committee.