Columbia India Hour: Shaping Maharashtra's Future

Maharashtra's $5 Trillion Vision and the Quest for Continuity

The conversation opened against the backdrop of the recent BRICS summit and India's own Viksit Bharat 2047 ambition: a $30 trillion economy by the centenary of independence. Maharashtra, which already contributes about 14% of India's GDP, has set itself the goal of becoming a $5 trillion piece of that puzzle, amounting to a significant share of the national target.

The plan responds to familiar problem in Indian governance: every time an administration changes, priorities and personnel change with it, and long-term continuity suffers. Viksit Maharashtra 2047 is meant to be the antidote. It aims to be a long-term vision that survives changes in government and allows for incremental progress toward a single, shared goal.

The Vision Document — Structure

• 4 pillars: Growth, Sustainability, Inclusivity, Good Governance.
• 4 themes/chapters under each pillar → 16 total chapters/themes.
• 100 initiatives spanning the full 22-year period, built around three horizons 2029–30 (end of the current government's mandate), 2035 (Maharashtra's 75th year of statehood), 2047 (India at 100)
• Developed through a 7-month consultative process involving experts, private sector, civil society, government departments, and a statewide citizen survey so ordinary citizens could flag which problems mattered most to them.
• Nearly every one of the 100 initiatives is deliberately written to require multiple government departments working together, to enable interdepartmental collaboration rather than siloed execution, so accountability is built into the design

The Vision Management Unit

Maharashtra became one of the first Indian states to create a dedicated Vision Management Unit to translate this vision into action. Led by Radha as CEO, the unit's work has five parts:

• Support planning: Translating a 22-year ambition into specific, measurable, bite-sized milestones for each government department, with the next four years as the foundation-building phase
• Policy alignment: Ensuring government spending and disbursements are tied to the plan
• Progress monitoring, including data: Monitoring progress of the milestones including data, distinguishing outputs (money disbursed) from outcomes. For example, did a direct benefit transfer for women empowerment actually translate into more women entrepreneurs, better skilling, higher labour-force participation?. The goal is “triangulating" actions → money→ outcomes. 
• Interdepartmental collaboration: Coordinating action across the state's more than 450 government departments, 36 districts, and 6 divisional offices
• Vision alignment: Ensuring every government employee and citizen feels a sense of ownership: “it is not something the state is doing in a silo, but something I am a participant in”

Running the effort is quite enormous. .  The state government has more than 40 departments, 36 districts, and 6 divisional offices. But the goal is to institutionalize the work, not build a large personal team. "My job every day is to institutionalize this work”, Radha said.  The goal is that the work continues regardless of who is in government. 

Asked what it takes to make a multi-stakeholder effort like this succeed, she said finding the right people for each role above all else – “You can have a fish try to climb a tree, but it’s not going to work” 

Radha's Journey to Viksit Maharashtra

Radha is a chartered accountant, a post-graduate in business and public administration by training. Before taking on this role, Radha worked in consulting, in the banking and financial services domain, at a global philanthropic foundation, and at the United Nations — where she helped scale a fiscal policy initiative across over 40 countries, worked on Strategy and Financing for a global initiative connecting young people to opportunities in over 50 countries, catalysed unlocking of global capital in support of children across 190 countries including leading the development of the Child-Lens Investing Framework, recognized by Time Magazine as one of its top global inventions of 2024. She was named a SIPA Emerging Leader Alumni Award recipient in 2023 and continues to lecture part-time at the school. 

She credits Columbia SIPA — where her cohort spanned 77 nationalities — with the diversity of thought and doors it opened, alongside crisis-management experience and a deeper sense of self-discovery that continue to shape how she leads Viksit Maharashtra today.