Centre considers releasing GatiShaakti master plan in public domain

The Centre is considering releasing the GatiShakti national master plan in public domain, the commerce and industry ministry said on Tuesday.

At the moment, only state and central government ministries and departments can access the portal to execute infrastructure projects in a time-bound manner.

The government has already started working on its guidelines before making the portal public. Preparing protocols for private user access is crucial, considering data security concerns.

The deliberation was made during a review meeting of the PM GatiShakti chaired by commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday.

Launched in October 2021, the GatiShakti national master plan is being developed into a digital platform. It is integrating the existing portal and data of key infrastructure ministries, as well as state governments. It has been prepared depicting the economic zones and the infrastructure linkages needed to support them.

The review meeting discussed plans for faster integration of data into the portal. With over 900 data layers updated by central ministries and 316 essential layers by states and Union Territories, the meeting took note of various ministries using it to share their proposed projects, an official statement said.

“The meeting particularly emphasised the role the National Master Plan could play in decision making for the social sector.

Since its launch, the portal has been able to reduce pendency, thus leading to faster implementation of projects,” the statement said.

According to industry department’s special secretary, Amrit Lal Meena, with portals of central and state ministries now fully functional, all essential data layers have been uploaded. It will enable infrastructure ministries to extensively utilise the master plan for all pending and future projects.

He also added that government departments started to make use of Prime Minister Gati Shakti-led digital technology initiative to reduce the execution time of infrastructure projects

“The Taranga Hill-Ambaji-Abu Road broad gauge new railway line had stalled its pre-alignment for nearly six months due to lack of khasra data, field survey on forest and wildlife sanctuary and no visibility of intersection with mining areas. It was completed in just seven days using the National Master Plan.

Senior official representing the ministry of road transport and highways also shared that the pre-alignment of five greenfield corridors were fast-tracked using the National Master Plan,” the statement quoted Meena as saying.

Development of project alignment at the pre-feasibility stage of an infrastructure project is a critical step towards the preparation of a detailed project report (DPR).

Developing project alignment requires huge cost and time since survey teams need to be present on the ground and manually complete the process.

With the Centre’s push towards Gati Shakti and the use of the digital portal, the alignment can be drawn digitally in less than a week. Normally, this task would have taken three-four months.

The meeting deliberated the progress achieved so far and saw participation from various senior officials from railways, highways ministry, steel ministry, coal ministry and Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics, among others.