The three prerogatives that come first in the vision document — clean air and potable water, food and nutritional security, 24x7 energy — are the ones where the state builds things. They are also where the audit is most interesting, because two of them are running ahead of schedule and the third is running ahead of schedule on a measure we did not choose.
The targets we met with a decade to spare
The food and agriculture roadmap projected milk production of 230.5 MT by 2035, up from 137.7 MT in 2012-13, and per capita availability of 454 grams a day against 299. India passed both in 2024-25: 247.87 MT and 485 grams. Egg production, projected at 132.8 billion for 2035, stood at 149.11 billion.
Three twenty-year targets, met a decade before the date on them.
The comfortable response is to call this a success and move on. I do not think we are entitled to it. When a projection is overtaken with a decade to spare, the honest question is whether it was a target at all, or the existing trend drawn forward with a ruler. Milk production in India had been compounding at four to five per cent a year for a long time before 2015. A projection that assumed roughly that, over twenty years, was never going to be a stretch. It was arithmetic wearing the clothes of ambition.
Foodgrain is the useful contrast. The roadmap set 392 MT for 2035 against 265.5 MT in 2013-14; production reached 332 MT in 2023-24. That is 53 per cent of the distance in 53 per cent of the time — almost exactly on pace, which is roughly what a target should look like.
So the food and agriculture roadmap contains both kinds of number, and nothing in the presentation distinguishes them. That is the same defect the health roadmap has, in a happier form.
Water: the connection and the supply
The vision document asked that everyone be able to draw safe drinking water from a tap, within the habitat or close to it. Rural coverage went from about 17 per cent of households in 2019 to just over 82 per cent by July 2026.
I want to give this its due. Whatever one says about implementation in this country, that is a genuine delivery achievement at a scale nobody else attempts, and it is the single best-performing prerogative in the whole document.
Then there is the second number. A government-commissioned survey found roughly three in four connected households reporting a reliable and safe supply. Apply that and something close to 62 per cent of rural households are actually getting what the prerogative describes, rather than 82.
I am not raising this to diminish the achievement. I am raising it because of what it says about how we wrote targets. "Every household has a tap" is countable, photographable and reportable monthly. "Every household reliably gets safe water" is none of those things. We wrote the prerogative in the second form and the system, quite reasonably, has been measured against the first.
Electrons: capacity is not supply
The same gap, in a more consequential place.
India crossed half its installed generating capacity from non-fossil sources in June 2025, nine years ahead of our horizon and five ahead of the Paris commitment. Non-fossil capacity stood at 283.46 GW on 31 March 2026, and the 55.3 GW added during 2025-26 was the largest annual addition the country has managed. This is real and it deserves the attention it gets.
But look at what our own energy roadmap said. Its 2013 baseline was that fossil fuels accounted for about 80 per cent of the electricity supply. Dr Kakodkar's preamble likewise called for a significant fraction — say 50 per cent — of electricity supply from non-fossil sources by 2035.
Non-fossil sources produced 29.2 per cent of India's electricity in 2025-26.
On the measure we ourselves chose, we have covered under a third of the distance, and the milestone everyone celebrates has not been reached. Capacity and generation diverge because solar and wind run at lower capacity factors than coal, which is not a scandal — it is physics and economics — but it does mean that a target expressed in one unit and reported in another will mislead everybody, including the people setting it.
And the wires. The vision document asked for transmission and distribution losses below 3 per cent. Aggregate technical and commercial losses were 15.07 per cent in 2022-23 and 15.04 per cent in 2024-25 — essentially unchanged across three years, on a measure that is in any case more forgiving than the one we specified. We are adding generation far faster than we are fixing what carries it.
What these three have in common
Milk, water and electrons look like three different stories. They are one story told three times.
In each case the country has built impressively and the built quantity is ahead of, or close to, what we projected. In each case the thing the citizen actually receives — nutrition rather than tonnage, safe water rather than a tap, electricity delivered rather than capacity installed — sits well behind. And in each case the gap is invisible in the headline number because we specified the headline number in the units of construction rather than the units of delivery.
If a successor exercise takes one operational lesson from this document, I would want it to be this: never a coverage target without a service target printed beside it, in the same box, on the same page.
Next: the technology we filed under "future".
Prabhat Ranjan was Executive Director of TIFAC through the preparation and launch of Technology Vision 2035.
Baselines and targets: Technoscape roadmaps 3 (Food and Agriculture) and 5 (Energy), and Technology Vision 2035, printed pages 16 and 57-58. Current figures: Basic Animal Husbandry Statistics 2025; Ministry of Agriculture; Ministry of Jal Shakti and a 2024 functionality survey; MNRE and CEA via PIB; Power Finance Corporation, Performance of Power Utilities 2024-25.