: Opinion: Powering Gati Shakti #IndiaNEWS #News By Avi Dutt, Atul Sanganeria The government’s thrust on infrastructure projects just received a new lease of life through the PM Gati Shakti programme.

Opinion: Powering Gati Shakti #IndiaNEWS #News
By Avi Dutt, Atul Sanganeria
The government’s thrust on infrastructure projects just received a new lease of life through the PM Gati Shakti programme. This programme cuts across transport and connectivity, industrial and urban development with the end goal of improving movement of goods, services and passengers.
Since 2014, the government has made commendable efforts for the implementation of large-scale infrastructure projects, including the privatisation of several assets and facilities where private sector efficiency was much needed.
Data-driven Approach
However, the PM Gati Shakti plan is backed by a more scientific and data-driven approach towards national infrastructure and multimodal planning using analytical GIS (Geographic Information System) based tools. Developed countries like Germany and Singapore have already tried this approach, but this move marks a massive and transformational reform for India. These efforts will help break away from the past trend of infrastructure development in silos and help coordination among the 16 key ministries for planning and development.
It is also expected to encourage the spirit of cooperative federalism, as the synchronisation of State level plans with the National Master Plan is a sine qua non for success. There is a precedent of this level of cooperation between the States and the Central government — the NICDC (National Industrial Corridor Development Corporation Limited) is a good example, whereby industrial corridors were developed with the cooperation of the State and Central governments.
It will also improve economic competitiveness by reducing logistics costs and ensuring demand responsive planning by helping eradicate imbalances and irregularities in infrastructure planning and creation across the country.
End Goal
The implementation of the PM Gati Shakti programme requires plans to be implemented proactively at the State level. The end goal is to improve the efficiency of the value chains of specific products and industries through infrastructure development.
This infrastructure creation would also result in a big fillip to the competitiveness of the various sectors of the economy by linking State-level production, consumption, and storage centres to national gateways (with a seamless interconnected multimodal network to reduce logistics costs).
The PM Gati Shakti Master Plan has a well-crafted institutional structure at both the Central and State level and several States have actively set up State-level coordination mechanisms for logistics connectivity. However, there is also a need to nudge States to actively participate in this effort. One such initiative that has already been implemented is the LEADS (Logistics Ease Across Different States), which provides logistics ranking of different States and areas and scope of improvement and creates healthy competition among States to improve their rankings.

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