UNNATI Concept

Capacity building of civil servants is central to achieving responsive governance, effective public service delivery, and successful implementation of national priorities. Mission Karmayogi has established a strong foundation for competency-driven learning through the iGOT Karmayogi platform, enabling digital learning aligned with role-based competency requirements.

While digital learning provides scale and accessibility, institutional learning remains critical for developing behavioural competencies, experiential learning, leadership capabilities, peer-to-peer exchange, contextual problem-solving, and practical application of knowledge. Training Institutions (TIs) therefore remain the backbone of India's civil service capacity-building ecosystem.

Recognising the importance of institutional excellence, the Capacity Building Commission (CBC) introduced the National Standards for Civil Service Training Institutions (NSCSTI), which established a common framework for assessing and strengthening institutional quality and maturity. Through NSCSTI, 210 institutions, including 23 Central Training Institutes (CTIs), were accredited, with 10 institutions achieving the highest five-star rating.

NSCSTI successfully established quality benchmarks and brought standardisation to the training ecosystem. However, institutional engagement remained largely periodic, with assessments conducted once every two years. While accreditation provided valuable insights, it offered limited visibility into institutional performance between assessment cycles and limited opportunities for continuous collaboration, resource sharing, and institutional development.

At the same time, the capacity-building ecosystem faces broader challenges. Training Institutions often operate in isolation, faculty expertise remains dispersed, infrastructure utilisation varies significantly across institutions, programme development efforts are frequently duplicated, and training demand signals are not always systematically linked to competency requirements. Policymakers also lack a comprehensive view of national training capacity, utilisation, and performance.

As the ecosystem matures, there is a need to move beyond periodic assessment towards a continuously connected, collaborative, and data-driven institutional ecosystem.

To address this need, CBC has evolved NSCSTI into the Unified New-Age National Training Initiative (UNNATI)

UNNATI represents the next phase of institutional transformation under Mission Karmayogi. It transforms institutional capacity building from a periodic accreditation exercise into a continuous development ecosystem that enables collaboration, performance improvement, resource optimisation, and competency-driven programme delivery across the country.

At the heart of this transformation is the need for Training Institutions to transform themselves into future-ready institutions, capable of driving the vision of Viksit Bharat @ 2047 under Mission Karmayogi. Under UNNATI, an institution is no longer defined solely by its role in delivering training: it will be able to respond systematically to identified competency requirements, align its programs to relevant groups of officials, benchmark its own performance, assure and continuously improve training quality, and collaborate across the national network. In effect, UNNATI transforms the Training Institution into a Capacity Building Institution, one that works across the full capacity-building lifecycle rather than delivering individual training programmes alone.

The initiative significantly expands the scope of engagement from approximately 350 institutions under NSCSTI to more than 700 Training Institutions across the country, including institutions at the central, state, regional, zonal, and district levels. This expanded ecosystem will create, for the first time, a comprehensive national view of institutional capacity-building infrastructure and capabilities.

UNNATI will enable institutions to share:

• Infrastructure and training facilities
• Faculty and subject matter expertise
• Training programmes and learning resources

By enabling greater collaboration and visibility, UNNATI will improve utilisation of public investments in training infrastructure, reduce duplication of effort, strengthen institutional capabilities, and expand access to quality learning opportunities aligned to empirically identified competencies across government.

Ultimately, UNNATI seeks to ensure that every public official has access to the right learning intervention at the right stage of their professional journey, thereby strengthening governance outcomes and citizen service delivery.

The objective of UNNATI is to create a unified national ecosystem for institutional capacity building by connecting more than 700 Training Institutions through a common platform and framework for collaboration, continuous improvement, performance management, and resource sharing.

Training Institutions perform multiple interrelated functions that collectively shape the capacity-building ecosystem, including:

• Translation of identified competency requirements into appropriate capacity-building interventions
• Training Needs Analysis and course design
• Delivery of learning interventions
• Faculty development and engagement
• Development of knowledge resources and case studies
• Assessment of learning outcomes
• Institutional performance improvement

These functions make clear that a Training Institution’s role already extends well beyond conducting training programmes. UNNATI’s objective is to equip every institution to fulfil this full role (demand identification, nomination, quality assurance, faculty development, and performance improvement) as a true Capacity Building Institution, rather than a training-delivery unit alone.

However, these functions often operate across fragmented systems, processes, and formats. As a result:

• Training demand signals captured through Capacity Building Plans do not inform Training Institutions’ programs
• Programme design is not consistently linked to competency requirements
• Faculty expertise remains dispersed
• Knowledge resources remain fragmented across institutions
• Similar programme development efforts are frequently duplicated
• Infrastructure remains underutilised in some areas while capacity gaps persist elsewhere
• Insights from programme delivery and Capacity Building Plans are not systematically fed back into planning processes
• Institutions spend considerable effort on repetitive documentation and reporting activities, including identifying which officials need to be nominated for which training

UNNATI addresses these challenges by creating an integrated institutional ecosystem that strengthens the linkage between competency requirements, training demand, programme delivery, institutional performance, and learning outcomes. Central to this is enabling Training Institutions to use Capacity Building Plans as a continuous demand signal for programme planning, rather than relying mainly on periodic and standalone Training Needs Analysis exercises.

UNNATI also supports institutional development across key areas including Governance and Leadership, Training Needs Analysis and Course Design aligned to Capacity Building Plans, Faculty Development, Infrastructure and Digital Readiness, Collaboration and Resource Sharing, Performance Monitoring, and Innovation and Continuous Improvement.

UNNATI envisions a connected, collaborative, and continuously improving national training ecosystem in which institutions function as an integrated network rather than isolated entities.

The initiative seeks to enable institutions to:

• Collaborate in programme design and delivery
• Access faculty expertise across the ecosystem
• Share infrastructure, knowledge resources, and faculty
• Improve utilisation of public investments in training
• Reduce administrative burden
• Generate actionable insights for decision-making
• Respond to identified competency gaps and priority group of officials
• Continuously improve institutional performance and training quality

Through UNNATI, Training Institutions will evolve from independent centres of learning into a national network of excellence capable of supporting the competency requirements of a future-ready civil service.

A defining new capability of UNNATI is converting the Capacity Building Plans into a live, continuously active Training Needs Analysis mechanism for Training Institutions, replacing the effort-intensive, manual exercises Training Institutions currently undertake on their own. This is a clear marker of the shift from Training Institution to Capacity Building Institution: needs identification and nomination, functions upstream of training delivery, become an active part of an institution’s own role, rather than a separate planning exercise handed down to it.

Through this mechanism, UNNATI will:

Taken together, this transforms Training Needs Analysis and nomination from a periodic, manual, and largely paper-based exercise into a continuous, data-driven, and largely automated function, freeing Training Institutions effort for programme quality and delivery rather than demand discovery and officer identification.

UNNATI will integrate with iGOT Karmayogi and e-HRMS / State HR systems to create a unified view of the capacity-building journey of public officials. This integration also enables active monitoring of the offline completion of Capacity Building Plans (CBPs) by individual officials: whether an official has actually completed the institutional (in-person / offline) training component of their CBP, not only their online learning on iGOT.

iGOT Karmayogi provides the digital ecosystem for competency-based learning and includes AI-enabled tools for preparing CBPs, which UNNATI translates into structured learning interventions delivered through institutional learning environments.

Further, integration with e-HRMS / State HR systems will enable:

• Structured mapping of programmes to competency frameworks
• Monitoring of programme delivery against identified capacity-building priorities, including offline completion tracking via e-HRMS / State HR systems
• Continuous refinement of capacity-building plans based on programme delivery insights and learning outcomes

This closes a visibility gap that previously existed between an official’s digital learning record and their institutional training record. All integrations with State HRMS systems will be carried out in close coordination with State Governments, ATIs, and General Administration Departments.

This integration will enable Training Institutions, the Capacity Building Ecosystem, and policymakers to understand:

• What competencies are required
• What gaps exist
• Which programmes address those gaps
• How learning interventions are delivered
• What outcomes are achieved
• Whether officials have completed the training assigned to them, online and offline

A defining feature of UNNATI is its shift from periodic assessment to continuous institutional development and performance monitoring.

The platform introduces real-time dashboards that enable institutions and policymakers to monitor institutional performance continuously through indicators including, but not limited to:

• Faculty utilisation
• Infrastructure utilisation
• Programme delivery metrics
• Competency coverage
• Collaboration indicators
• Learning outcomes
• Institutional maturity and performance trends

To move institutional standards from a static, once-in-two-years accreditation exercise towards an actively tracked and improvable benchmark, UNNATI introduces the UNNATI Capability Index as the successor to NSCSTI accreditation and the star-rating system. Under UNNATI, the Capability Index is the single national mechanism for assessing and recognising institutional quality; periodic NSCSTI-style accreditation is retired in its favour. The Index reflects this same shift in identity: it benchmarks institutions not merely as training providers, but as Capacity Building Institutions, accountable for outcomes across the full capacity-building lifecycle.

For each parameter, the Index sets a defined performance threshold representing what a high-performing Training Institution should achieve. AI-assisted analysis continuously assesses each institution against these thresholds: where an institution meets or exceeds a threshold, this is recognised, and where it falls short, the Index does not simply flag the gap, it generates specific, actionable recommendations on what the institution needs to do to reach that threshold. This assess-and-guide mechanism replaces the once-in-two-years assessment cycle with continuous, real-time visibility, so institutions always know where they stand and what to do next.

The Capability Index measures institutional performance across indicative parameters, including but not limited to:

• Training delivery: consistency, reach, and effectiveness of programme delivery
• Training quality: alignment with competency frameworks, learner outcomes, and the Karmayogi Quality Framework
• Faculty management and development: availability, utilisation, and continuous development of faculty
• Infrastructure utilisation: how effectively institutional infrastructure is used and shared
• Governance and administration: institutional policies, processes, and management effectiveness

These parameters are indicative rather than exhaustive, and will be reviewed and updated periodically as institutional and ecosystem needs evolve.

By making these benchmarks continuous and visible rather than periodic and static, the Capability Index gives institutions an active, ongoing incentive and pathway to improve, turning accreditation-style standards into a live performance-management tool.

UNNATI connects all Training Institutions into a single national network, and its already-live marketplace and pooling functions (infrastructure sharing, course content sharing, and faculty sharing) are central to how this connectivity translates into measurable gains. By optimising the utilisation and performance of Training Institutions, these shared pools directly improve both the coverage (how many officials and institutions a training reaches) and the quality (how well-designed and well-delivered it is) of training across the ecosystem.

UNNATI further strengthens course quality by connecting Training Institutions, Ministries/Departments/Organisations (MDOs), and State Governments with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to jointly create and update courses. This SME collaboration ensures that course content stays current, technically sound, and aligned with the Karmayogi Quality Framework, giving institutions, MDOs, and States access to expertise they may not hold in-house and giving SMEs a structured channel to contribute to national capacity-building content.

A central design principle of UNNATI is to minimise institutional effort while enhancing institutional capability.

The platform is designed to:

• Reduce repetitive data entry
• Capture information through routine institutional workflows
• Enable institutions to upload documents in existing formats
• Convert unstructured documents into structured insights using AI
• Support programme planning through intuitive workflows
• Generate actionable insights through simple and accessible dashboards
• Enable evidence-based decision-making at institutional and ecosystem levels
• Keep AI assistive and human-in-the-loop: AI assesses institutional and individual performance against defined standards and generates recommendations, but final judgement and decision-making authority remains with institutions, nominating authorities, and assessors

In practice, this AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop approach works as an assess-and-guide mechanism, most visibly in the Capability Index and quality assurance processes. AI checks institutional or programme performance against a defined standard or threshold and reports whether that standard is met. Where a threshold is not met, the platform does not stop at flagging the shortfall, it generates specific, actionable recommendations for closing the gap. The institution, faculty, or assessor then decides what action to take. This keeps UNNATI a tool that assesses and advises, while people remain responsible for the decisions and improvements that follow, so that institutions and officials stay comfortable with how the platform is being used.

UNNATI is intended to function as a natural working environment for Training Institutions rather than as an additional compliance or reporting requirement. Adoption will be driven by the value the platform provides in simplifying institutional operations while strengthening institutional effectiveness.