---
title: "Team India Hub (NITI Aayog): Role & Function"
description: "The Team India Hub is NITI Aayog's key vertical for managing central-state relations, essential for promoting cooperative federalism in India."
url: "https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/glossary/team-india-hub-niti-aayog"
---

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Model Diplomat Research Team · Last reviewed June 22, 2026

TL;DR

- The Team India Hub is one of two principal verticals within NITI Aayog, tasked with managing relations between the central government and India's states and union territories.
- How does the Team India Hub differ from the Knowledge and Innovation Hub within NITI Aayog?
- Why is the Team India Hub relevant to cooperative federalism?

[Civil Service & Diplomatic Exams](https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/civil-services/glossary)Updated June 22, 2026

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## Positions at a glance

### Supporters

The Team India Hub stands alongside the second vertical, the Knowledge and Innovation Hub, which houses NITI Aayog's research, sectoral analysis, and resource-centre functions. The division of labour is conceptual: the Team India Hub owns the relationship dimension — federal engagement, state coordination, and the mechanics of consensus-building — while the Knowledge and Innovation Hub builds the analytical and intellectual capacity that informs advice. Within the broader NITI Aayog structure these verticals sit beneath the Governing Council, the apex body chaired by the Prime Minister and comprising all chief ministers and the lieutenant governors of union territories, and the CEO and Vice-Chairperson who run day-to-day operations. The Team India Hub provides much of the institutional support that makes Governing Council deliberation and follow-up possible, translating high-level political consensus into continuing administrative engagement.

### Opponents

In contemporary practice the Team India Hub's coordinating logic is visible in mechanisms NITI Aayog has championed from its headquarters in New Delhi. The Aspirational Districts Programme, launched in January 2018, exemplifies the federal-partnership model the Hub embodies, ranking and supporting the country's least-developed districts through joint Centre–state effort. NITI Aayog's competitive-federalism instruments — the SDG India Index, the various sectoral indices on health, water, and education that benchmark states against one another — likewise depend on the kind of sustained state engagement the Hub coordinates. The empowered groups of secretaries and sectoral consultations that NITI Aayog has run, and its support to states during periods of crisis coordination, all draw on this vertical's relationship-management function. NITI Aayog's published documents have over time restructured and renamed internal teams, so the precise internal nomenclature has evolved since 2015, but the federal-coordination function the Team India Hub was created to perform remains central to the institution.

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Example

In January 2018, NITI Aayog launched the Aspirational Districts Programme from New Delhi, operationalising the Centre–state partnership model embodied by its Team India Hub across 112 of the country's least-developed districts.

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