Raipur, (VW) Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai on Thursday announced the Chief Minister’s Excellence Awards 2025–26, recognising 10 impactful governance initiatives implemented across districts and state departments. Instituted by the Department of Good Governance and Convergence, the awards highlight Chhattisgarh’s focus on outcome-based, technology-enabled and citizen-centric public administration.
The awards were selected following a rigorous multi-stage evaluation of 312 entries—275 from districts and 37 from departments. After a detailed screening of 55 shortlisted projects, 10 winners were chosen, equally divided between district-level and departmental initiatives. The evaluation framework prioritised tangible outcomes, scalability, and institutional reform.
Addressing the occasion, the Chief Minister stated that innovation in governance is a responsibility rather than an option. He emphasised that public systems must continuously reinvent themselves to respond to citizens’ needs with speed and transparency. He added that each awarded initiative represents a replicable model for future-ready administration.
Among the district-level winners, Dantewada’s blockchain-based land record digitisation was recognised for reducing record retrieval time from weeks to minutes and eliminating document fraud in tribal areas. Jashpur’s ‘Nirman Jashpur’ initiative was awarded for transforming infrastructure governance through real-time, geo-tagged tracking of over 7,300 works across 444 gram panchayats.
In Mohla-Manpur-Ambagarh Chowki, the ‘Augmented Take-Home Ration’ initiative was lauded for achieving a 77.5 per cent recovery rate among children with severe acute malnutrition. Gariyaband’s AI-enabled ‘Elephant Tracking and Alert App’ was recognised for reducing human-wildlife conflict casualties to near zero, while Narayanpur’s ‘Intify Intelligence Tool’ was awarded for enhancing internal security through geospatial data integration.
On the departmental front, the Education Department’s ‘Vidya Samiksha Kendra’ emerged as a winner for monitoring 56,000 schools and 57.5 lakh students using AI for dropout detection. The Commerce and Industries Department’s ‘One-Click Single Window System’ was honoured for streamlining 136 services to improve the ease of doing business.
Other departmental winners included the Commercial Tax and Excise Department for its end-to-end e-governance reforms, which recorded a revenue of ₹5,425 crore. The Forest and Climate Change Department’s ‘FDS 2.0’ (eKuber) was recognised for processing ₹1,776 crore in cashless payments via 18 lakh transactions. Additionally, the Panchayat and Rural Development Department was awarded for its QR code-based information disclosure initiative under MGNREGA across 11,000 gram panchayats.