LocationsWhen Systems Meet People : How everyday life improved in India in 2025
January 6, 2026
In Nagaland, a phone vibrates in a nurse’s pocket. Not a call nor a text message. A reminder. A child is due for a dose. The vial is safely stored. The appointment is scheduled.
In Odisha’s coastal region, women stand ankle-deep in brackish water, pressing young mangrove saplings into the mud. They talk about organic seed treatment. About pest management that does not depend on chemicals. About what to do when the next storm warning comes, and who will check on whom first. The mangroves will blunt the surge. The training will steady incomes. The preparedness will save time when time matters most.
These moments do not resemble each other. One happens in a clinic. The other in a tidal wetland. But they belong to the same story.
In 2025, many of the changes that shaped everyday life in India came from systems that learned to work together. Health platforms that followed people as they moved. Climate action that protected both land and livelihoods. Training that combined income, resilience, and local leadership.
UNDP has worked in India since the 1950s, long enough to understand that progress here is rarely about a single intervention. It is about alignment. Between policy and delivery at the last mile. Between data and people. Between national ambition and local reality. Between national solutions and international impact. In India, UNDP has been witnessing an incredible story of transformation, one that we are proud to have supported and contributed.
What follows is not a list of programmes. It is a map of connections. And of what became possible, in 2025, when those connections held. In practice, these connections showed up across four interlinked areas. In how systems stayed with people over time. In how prosperity was built with protection. In how climate action safeguarded both nature and livelihoods. And in how partnerships helped ideas travel, scale, and endure.
PEOPLE: Systems that stayed with people
Across health, justice, and governance, progress depended on whether systems could follow people across life stages, locations, and vulnerabilities. Continuity, not just access, made the difference.
Health
Maternal and child health outcomes depend not only on access to services, but on whether care continues over time.
In 2025, digital public health systems helped address some of these gaps. Working with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and GAVI, UNDP supported the strengthening of platforms that underpin routine immunization and maternal care.
Through Universal Immunization-WIN (U-WIN), 32 million pregnant women and 97 million children were tracked across states. At the same time, the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN) monitored vaccine availability and temperature across 30,000 cold-chain points, covering more than 650 million doses. Stock-outs declined, missed appointments were easier to identify, and families who migrated remained visible to the system. Over one million female health workers, were trained on U-WIN, enhancing digital literacy, service delivery, and equitable access to essential health services. With support from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), state systems improved digital platforms for frontline workers delivering maternal and child health services, resulting in better data use and more efficient workflows.
Vaccination of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) was tracked, ensuring last-mile inclusion. Under Anemia Mukt Bharat, 16 million women and 5 million men received timely haemoglobin notifications, enabling faster treatment.
UNDP also supported One Health systems in Tamil Nadu and Telangana, working with state governments and partners such as the Blockchain for Impact (BFI) Foundation to strengthen coordination across human, animal, and environmental health, improving preparedness for zoonotic risks.
Governance and justice
Justice services also became more accessible. Working with state legal services authorities and civil society, 1,600 people, including people living with HIV, gender-diverse communities, and persons with disabilities, received legal awareness and first-mile justice support. Over 500 para-legal volunteers were trained, strengthening access to legal aid closer to where people live.
For tribal communities, governance shifted closer to home. Under the AdiKarmyogi Programme, around 270,000 community facilitators were trained to support forest rights and local governance across more than 16,000 villages. This helped set up over 13,000 Adi Sewa Kendras (local support centres that help tribal communities access services and entitlements) and more than 11,000 Community Forest Rights committees, making forest governance more decentralized and easier for people to navigate.
In Maharashtra, UNDP’s technical support on inclusive implementation of the Forest Rights Act helped restore gram sabhas’ authority to issue transport permits for minor forest produce, removing long-standing barriers to community rights, strengthening women’s livelihood opportunities, and reinforcing local, rights-based decision-making. This work was reinforced by a comprehensive assessment of two decades of Forest Rights Act implementation, which offered evidence-based recommendations to improve governance, gender equity, data systems, legal alignment, and financing. Parallel efforts in tribal districts, in partnership with the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) and the Living Landscape initiative, strengthened gram sabhas’ governance capacity, improved community forest resource planning, aligned village-level development planning, and supported access to entitlements, consolidating locally led and sustainable forest governance.
PROSPERITY: Work that held, incomes that endured
Economic participation proved strongest where work was possible, protected, and resilient. Care, skills, insurance, and labour protections began to reinforce one another, rather than operate in isolation.
Care and work
India’s women’s workforce participation rose in 2025, supported in part by a shift in how childcare was understood.
Evidence generated through pilots and financing studies, in partnership with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), and the Gates Foundation, helped demonstrate how affordable, community-based childcare could enable women to take up paid work while creating jobs in the care economy itself. Under Mission Shakti’s PALNA scheme, this evidence began shaping more scalable and affordable childcare models, particularly in urban, low-income areas. Care started to be recognised not only as unpaid work within households, but as essential infrastructure for economic participation.
Livelihoods
For many young people, the challenge has been ensuring that skills training leads to real employment opportunities.
For example, implemented with the Government of Jharkhand and the Jharkhand Skill Development Mission Society (JSDMS), training was closely aligned with local labour market demand. 116,000 youth were trained, 77 percent women. Over 55 percent moved into formal employment, including in healthcare, apparel, and IT-enabled services. For participants, this meant skills that translated into income and stability.
Livelihoods were strongest where work came with protection. With the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (MoAFW), crop insurance under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) expanded to 42 million farmers, including 20 percent women. Digital tools improved crop-loss assessments, reduced errors, and enabled faster claim settlement. When climate shocks occurred, farmers were able to recover without falling into debt.
Under the National Action for Mechanized Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE) scheme, implemented with Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE) , civil society, and private-sector partners including Hindustan Unilever Limited, Coca-Cola India, and The Coca-Cola Foundation, 34,900 waste pickers, 73 percent women, were linked to identity documents, health insurance, and welfare schemes. Legal awareness and first-mile justice support helped workers understand and claim their entitlements.
In parallel, UNDP advanced Business and Human Rights work in partnership with the Government of Japan, supporting responsible business practices and supply chains to strengthen the integration of human rights due diligence into business practices, strengthening labour protections beyond formal employment.
PLANET: Protecting ecosystems and incomes together
What mattered in 2025 was not just environmental protection, but whether climate action helped people recover faster, protect incomes, and reduce future losses. Across sectors, efforts increasingly linked ecosystems, livelihoods, and risk reduction rather than treating them as separate concerns.
UNDP worked closely with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) , philanthropies and private partners to advance its climate and sustainable ecosystem agenda, translating global commitments into actionable national and sub-national priorities.
The country is developing its first National Adaptation Plan and a gender-responsive Biodiversity Finance Plan, aligning climate, nature, and development priorities. States such as West Bengal and Karnataka designed Climate Finance Facilities to mobilise investments for resilience.
At the national level, India achieved a 67.5 percent reduction in Hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) production and consumption, fully meeting Montreal Protocol targets.
Community-led projects restored over 26,000 hectares of degraded land and supported more than 63,000 people with climate-resilient livelihoods. Women played a central role, with 2,100 women farmers adopting climate-resilient practices and over 300 Women Climate Champions mobilising nearly 4,000 self-help groups. These efforts were supported through partnerships with the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme (GEF SGP) and Gates Foundation.
India’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN), supported by GEF, Governments of Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom, as well as the European Union, worked with MoEFCC and the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) to identify biodiversity financing gaps and integrate nature into public spending and private investment decisions.
Evidence-based approaches also strengthened responses to urban environmental challenges. With support from the Lacuna Fund, UNDP India developed a hyperlocal dataset focused on targeted point sources of pollution in two of India’s most polluted cities - Patna and Gurugram, drawing on citizen science and societal intelligence to support more targeted pollution-reduction efforts.
With support of the European Union, India launched its first comprehensive study to evaluate the effectiveness of existing policies and strategies to reduce air pollution and its impact on health.
Clean energy access expanded alongside livelihoods. UNDP’s Decentralised Renewable Energy initiative, supported by the Government of Japan, advanced clean-energy livelihoods across Odisha, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu, and Bihar. Nearly 500 solar-powered systems were installed for micro-enterprises, improving productivity, working conditions, and energy security through locally anchored partnerships.
India also strengthened action on industrial pollution. With support from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), UNDP supported MoEFCC under the Global Elimination of Mercury in Non-Ferrous Metals Initiative (GEMINI) to reduce mercury emissions from the non-ferrous metals sector, supporting a transition towards safer and cleaner production practices.
UNDP also worked with National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) on the design of a Natural Catastrophe Risk Insurance Pool, a key recommendation of the XVth Finance Commission which aims to pool resources from the centre and state governments to support post-disaster reconstruction.
India also launched a new partnership to support circular economy approaches in the electronics sector. Supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and implemented by UNDP in partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the five-year initiative will strengthen the environmentally sound management of e-waste - one of the country’s fastest growing waste streams.
PARTNERSHIPS: Ideas that travelled and scaled
The impact of domestic reform deepened when systems, data, and ideas travelled beyond their original context. In 2025, partnerships helped translate national experience into global exchange and sharper decision making at home.
South–South Cooperation
India’s development experience increasingly shaped solutions beyond its borders through South–South Cooperation. In partnership with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and supported by UNDP, systems built to work at scale in India were shared with countries facing similar development challenges. India’s crop insurance reforms were taken to seven countries as a practical model to protect farmers from climate and income shocks, drawing on lessons from large-scale implementation and digital integration.
At the same time, India’s digital public health systems travelled further. Platforms such as U-WIN and eVIN were adapted in Zambia and Lao PDR with the support of Gates Foundation to strengthen immunization tracking, vaccine supply chains, and last-mile health delivery. These exchanges were not about replication, but about contextualising proven systems to fit national realities.
Policymaking
Across 33 states and union territories, development planning increasingly drew on district-level data linked to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Supported by partnerships with NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), and state governments, dashboards helped identify where gaps persisted in healthcare, livelihoods, and climate vulnerability.
Complementing it, the North Eastern Region District SDG Index focused on the eight states in India’s northeast, assessing progress on 84 indicators across 15 goals at the district level. provided a clearer picture of progress and disparities, helping states track results and course-correct. At the subnational level, Himachal Pradesh released India’s first climate-integrated Human Development Report, introducing a climate-adjusted Human Development Index.
Through the Sustainable Finance Facility, developed with the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the European Union, UNDP supported states in aligning planning and budgeting with development priorities, helping mobilise public and private finance for climate resilience, livelihoods, and social inclusion.
Together, these policy tools strengthened evidence-based governance, turning data into decisions that better reflected people’s realities.
Campaigns
In 2025, public engagement around development shifted from awareness to participation, with campaigns and advocates bringing complex issues into everyday life. Proud to Switch reframed energy choices as simple, achievable actions and reached over 10 million views across UNDP India’s social media platforms. Ghar Se Shuru moved conversations on gender equality into homes by focusing on unpaid care work and shared responsibility. Actor and UNDP Goodwill Ambassador Nikolaj Coster-Waldau engaged closely with UNDP India’s work through his country visit and a documentary on climate action and inequality, and his presence around the United Nations General Assembly, alongside youth advocate Prajakta Koli, helped link lived experiences in India with global debates. These efforts were reinforced by voices like Bhumi Pednekar, who amplified climate action and Sanjana Sanghi, who spotlighted youth leadership as part of the UN Young Leaders for the SDGs.
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