Twenty-six years after a tenacious statehood movement carved Uttarakhand out of Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami stood before the Vidhan Sabha complex at Bharadiisain (Gairsain) in Chamoli district on 9 November 2026 and laid out an ambitious ledger of what the hill state has built — and what it still intends to become.

A tribute before a scorecard

Dhami opened the 26th Uttarakhand Foundation Day ceremony with salutes rather than statistics. He paid tribute to the soldiers who gave their lives defending the country, expressed condolences to families who lost members in natural disasters, and bowed to the andolankariyon ka sangharsh, tyag aur balidan — the struggle, sacrifice and martyrdom of the statehood movement activists. Former Prime Minister and Bharat Ratna Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose government created Uttarakhand as India's 27th state on 9 November 2000, also received a formal tribute. Only then did the CM turn to numbers.

Economy, budget and the SDG table-topper

The headline figure was economic scale. Dhami cited the state's economy growing from roughly ₹2.55 lakh crore in 2022 to approximately ₹3.82 lakh crore today, with the annual budget crossing ₹1.11 lakh crore. He pointed to Uttarakhand finishing first in the NITI Aayog Sustainable Development Goals Index 2023-24 as independent validation of the state's governance trajectory — a ranking that cuts across health, education, environment and institutional quality.

Roads, rails and ropeways into the high Himalaya

The connectivity agenda dominated the infrastructure section. The Char Dham road project, the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway, the Rishikesh-Karnprayag rail project, and ropeways to Kedarnath and Hemkund Sahib were cited as transformative for both pilgrimage and commerce in terrain where every kilometre of road is hard-won. The Vibrant Village Programme — the Centre's border-area development initiative — is currently running approximately 200 schemes across 51 frontier villages in Uttarakhand.

Health cards, virtual classrooms and anti-cheat law

On welfare, Dhami said the Atal Ayushman Yojana has issued more than 63 lakh health insurance cards. A cancer institute at Haldwani and an AIIMS satellite centre at Kichha are in progress. Virtual classrooms are running in approximately 1,300 schools, and 226 schools have been upgraded under the PM SHRI scheme. A strict anti-copying law has, he said, brought transparency to recruitment — and more than 35,000 government jobs have been filled in the last five years.

Women, soldiers and the 38th National Games

Women's empowerment was flagged through 30 per cent horizontal reservation in government jobs and 33 per cent in cooperative management committees. More than three lakh women have become Lakhpati Didis — micro-entrepreneurs with annual income above ₹1 lakh. For the armed forces community, the ex-gratia for martyrs' families has been raised from ₹10 lakh to ₹50 lakh, the Sainya Dham memorial is near completion, and Agniveers receive reserved uniformed posts. On the sporting front, Uttarakhand athletes won 103 medals at the 38th National Games. The ceremony also honoured sports talents Aarushi Negi, Mahak Rawat and Harshvardhan Bisht, along with statehood movement veterans and the family of folk legend Gopal Babu Goswami.

With a Uniform Civil Code, tightened land laws and an anti-copying statute already in force, Uttarakhand is positioning the third decade of the 21st century — in Dhami's words — as 'Uttarakhand's decade.' The question now is whether the infrastructure on the drawing board can match the ambition written into the numbers.