The study empirically examines the role of institutional quality in shaping India’s economic growth over the period 1996–2023. Using annual time-series data, the analysis investigates the long-run and short-run relationships between GDP per capita and key governance indicators control of corruption, political stability, and voice and accountability alongside selected macroeconomic variables, namely health expenditure, trade openness, and foreign direct investment inflows. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach is employed to test for cointegration among the variables, followed by estimation of long-run coefficients and an error correction model to capture short-run dynamics. The results confirm the existence of a stable long-run relationship between institutional quality and economic growth in India. Control of corruption and voice and accountability emerge as robust and statistically significant drivers of long-run per capita income growth, underscoring the importance of transparent and accountable governance structures. Political stability exhibits a positive but relatively weaker influence. Among the macroeconomic variables, health expenditure and trade openness contribute positively to long-run growth, while foreign direct investment is found to be statistically insignificant in the long run and negative in the short run. The error correction term indicates a rapid adjustment towards long-run equilibrium following short-term shocks. Robustness checks using Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and Canonical Cointegrating Regression (CCR) corroborate the main findings. Overall, the study highlights that sustained economic growth in India is closely linked to improvements in institutional quality, particularly in reducing corruption and strengthening democratic accountability, alongside investments in human capital and openness to trade.