Bringing Gati and Shakti to development

In the brief time since its launch, the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan (NMP) has demonstrated both the variety and scale of its advantages for planning infrastructure. All the critical infrastructure and social sector ministries of Government of India and the country’s 36 states and Union Territories have onboarded the platform with GIS-based data, and are strongly demonstrating its increasing usage to plan new infrastructure.

Today, we are witnessing historic capital investment outlays in the economy, which brings with it the challenge of planning better to ensure ease of doing business for production centres and ease of living for large populations. At the same time, there is the matter of addressing the needs for the movement of freight, labour and passenger traffic in a fast-growing, major economy, which demands efficient logistics for domestic movement and meeting ambitious EXIM targets. The Gati Shakti approach addresses these challenges, as our experience in the last few months has demonstrated.

The planning of the ambitious energy corridor of Indian Railways, for instance, has been done completely on the Gati Shakti principles, bringing together the ministries of coal, steel, mining and Railways for a comprehensive, joined-up approach. This has involved identifying new infrastructure works to strengthen last-mile connectivity to India’s coal fields, iron-ore mines, cement, and steel production centres. The planned corridor will meet the expanding energy and raw material requirements of a fast-growing economy, while propelling the movement of finished products such as cement and steel to end users in the true spirit of Gati Shakti. 

Similarly, all major expressways, with investments running into thousands of crores of rupees, are planned on the NMP digital platform to ensure multimodal connectivity. Whether it is the Pune-Bengaluru route in the western part of India or the Gorakhpur-Siliguri one in the eastern part, greenfield expressways stretching across hundreds of kilometres are all planned for connectivity to manufacturing centres and social nodes, synergising with railway terminals and inland container depots (ICDs) along the way.

Major towns of Uttar Pradesh such as Varanasi and Kanpur have planned outer ring roads to decongest the city, ensuring seamless movement of the flow of tourists, passengers, and labour as they come in from neighbouring towns or disembark at railway stations. The connectivity to airports and from the hinterland to major ports has all been mapped under the Gati Shakti approach.

In terms of regional connectivity, the movement of bulk commodities to the Northeastern region by waterways is reducing travel time, logistics cost and carbon footprint. Greenfield national highways, which connect the industrial parks in the Northeastern region to railways and the port gateways in Chittagong and Kolkata, while being mindful of the ecology of the region by minimising forest area coverage, are an interesting narrative emerging from the Gati Shakti initiative.

The benefits of using Gati Shakti NMP are showcased by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, which used to take 6-9 months for the 46 reports it generated under Detailed Route Survey (e-DRS) for each of its projects. Now this is done in a matter of hours, through a single click on the PMGS NMP, thereby also leading to savings of Rs 25,000 per km. Likewise, the Ministry of Railways sanctioned more than 400 Final Location Surveys (FLS) for new projects in 2022-23, an eight-fold jump over the previous year when it used manual surveys.

When planning big infrastructure projects, data-based decision making and digital surveys have substituted manual, field surveys, thereby revolutionising the planning process during a short period of time. The objectivity in decision making is visible when, for instance, optimum alignment and connectivity to economic activity defines a project rather than extraneous local considerations.

Ministries and departments, states and UTs are continuing to develop innovative use cases of the PMGS NMP portal to further improve the country’s logistics ecosystem and add to the ease of living of our citizens.

The planning on Gati Shakti has extended into innovative social sector usage, with the potential to bring strong benefits of service delivery to communities. Examples of this can be seen in the over one million Anganwadi centres mapped on the National Master Plan throughout India, with the potential output of tracking nutritional progress under the Poshan tracker. First and last-mile connectivity issues of schools, skill centres, hospitals and sports centres are being addressed by identifying the infrastructural gaps to these facilities.

It is the vision of the Prime Minister to take the integrated infrastructure planning approach of Gati Shakti up to the field level, with districts planning infrastructure and logistics to serve the needs of the people, identifying gaps to plan interventions and deliver better services. For instance, connecting schools to all-weather roads, power and internet, making all Anganwadi centres accessible, bringing farmers closer to markets, linking habitations to industrial parks for labour mobility, etc. are some of the low-hanging fruits envisaged by PM Gati Shakti, as it demonstrates the variety and scale of its transformational approach to area development planning.

The writer is special secretary (logistics), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India