Cooperative Federalism in Action: Examples From the Modi Era

This category has covered a considerable number of genuine Centre-state disputes and tensions. It’s equally important to look at where the system has actually worked well. This article covers three concrete examples of Centre-state coordination that functioned effectively, even during periods of considerable political friction elsewhere.

COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Coordination

Despite considerable political disagreement between the Centre and several opposition-ruled states over other aspects of pandemic management, India’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout required and largely achieved substantial operational coordination between central vaccine procurement and distribution planning and state-level administration infrastructure, since states were responsible for actually running vaccination centres, managing local logistics, and reaching specific population segments, while the Centre coordinated overall vaccine procurement, allocation formulas across states, and the digital Co-WIN registration platform used nationwide, a division of labour that, whatever the genuine debates over vaccine pricing and allocation policy during the rollout’s early phases, required and generally received sustained administrative cooperation from states across the political spectrum to actually deliver doses to over a billion people.

The GST Council’s Sustained Functioning Despite Disputes

Our earlier article on the GST Council documented real and repeated friction, including the 2020-2022 compensation cess dispute and the 2025 GST 2.0 rate simplification controversy. What’s equally notable, though, is that the Council has continued functioning and reaching consensus decisions across dozens of meetings since 2017 despite this friction, never breaking down entirely or leaving India without a functioning national indirect tax system, a genuine institutional resilience that reflects states across very different political alignments consistently choosing to remain engaged with the consensus-based process rather than abandoning it, even during periods of considerable disagreement over specific rate decisions or compensation arrangements.

Read this next: GST Council: How Federalism Works in India's Tax System

Joint Disaster Response During Major Cyclones

India’s disaster response system, coordinated through the National Disaster Response Force working alongside state disaster management authorities, has repeatedly demonstrated effective Centre-state coordination during major cyclone events affecting India’s eastern and southern coastlines, with pre-positioned NDRF teams, coordinated evacuation planning between central meteorological forecasting and state-level evacuation execution, and joint post-disaster relief operations that have generally proceeded with considerably less public Centre-state friction than the funding disputes covered in our earlier article on opposition-state fund clashes, since disaster response tends to activate a shared, immediate operational imperative that has, in practice, proven somewhat more insulated from the broader political disputes affecting other areas of Centre-state relations.

PM Gati Shakti’s Multi-State Infrastructure Coordination

Our earlier article on PM Gati Shakti covered how the platform coordinates infrastructure planning across more than a dozen central ministries. That same coordination logic extends across state boundaries as well, since major infrastructure corridors, highways, rail freight corridors, and power transmission lines, by their nature cross multiple state jurisdictions, requiring the kind of shared visibility and joint planning the platform is specifically designed to provide, an application of cooperative federalism principles to physical infrastructure planning that, while harder to measure in a single headline statistic than the platform’s overall project-evaluation numbers, represents an ongoing, functional example of Centre-state coordination operating at the technical and administrative level even when the same states’ political leadership is engaged in disputes over unrelated issues elsewhere.

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Why These Examples Matter Alongside the Disputes

It would be a misleading picture of Indian federalism to focus exclusively on the disputes covered throughout the rest of this category without also acknowledging that a considerable amount of essential Centre-state coordination, on public health emergencies, tax administration, disaster response, and infrastructure planning, has continued functioning throughout the same period, even during years marked by high-profile fights over Governors’ powers, delimitation, and fund devolution, a reminder that India’s federal system operates simultaneously at multiple levels, with genuine political conflict at the leadership level coexisting alongside sustained administrative cooperation at the operational level.

What This Suggests About the Overall System

Taken together with the disputes covered elsewhere in this category, these cooperative examples suggest India’s federal system is neither purely adversarial nor purely harmonious, but rather a genuinely mixed picture where the same Centre-state relationship can simultaneously feature serious institutional conflict over some questions, Governor powers, delimitation, specific fund releases, and functional, sustained cooperation on others, vaccine logistics, GST administration, disaster response, and infrastructure coordination, a nuance that a purely conflict-focused or purely harmony-focused account of Modi-era federalism would each, in their own way, misrepresent.

Bottom Line

Alongside the genuine disputes covered throughout this category, India’s Centre-state relationship has also produced sustained, functional cooperation in several important areas, including COVID-19 vaccine distribution logistics, the GST Council’s continued operation despite repeated disagreements, joint disaster response during major cyclones, and PM Gati Shakti’s cross-state infrastructure coordination, examples that together suggest Indian federalism under Modi is best understood as a genuinely mixed picture of simultaneous conflict and cooperation rather than either extreme alone.

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Abhyudaya Verma