Union Minister for Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal has hinted that the Pradhan Mantri Gatishakti National Master Plan would help remote areas. It will especially benefit the North East to undertake integrated infrastructure planning and closing development gaps.
According to Goyal, PM GatiShakti has the potential to save over Rs. 10 lakhs crores annually by improving logistics efficiency. He was addressing the National Workshop on PM GatiShakti held to mark the first anniversary of the rollout of the National Master Plan, in New Delhi on October 13.
The workshop focussed on the progress and achievements made by PM GatiShakti to date and the way forward.
Goyal said that PM GatiShakti is increasingly being used in the social sector for better infrastructure development, thereby, taking fruits of technology to every citizen of the country and improving ease of life for the common man.
The Plan will transform the way we work and the outcomes of our work and will drive economic development, Goyal said. He observed that the entire nation has come together, transcending political differences to use PM GatiShakti to the best possible extent.
Goyal opined that the anniversary celebrations must be used as an opportunity to visualize and conceive plans for the future. He asked all stakeholders to envision out-of-the-box ways to utilize it for better, more economical, and time-bound infrastructure planning.
PM GatiShakti is a transformative approach for integrated and holistic planning across concerned Ministries/Departments to improve multimodal connectivity, and logistics efficiency and address critical gaps for the seamless movement of people, and goods, with a focus on minimizing disruptions and ensuring timely completion of works.
It may be noted that in the last 8 years, Capital Expenditure has seen over 4 times increase from Rs. 1.75 lac crores in 2014 to Rs. 7.5 lac crores in 2022. The development of 7.582 km of new roads, 2500 km of new petroleum & gas pipelines, 29,040 circuits km, and 200 million tonnes of cargo being handled by India’s railway network has been constructed adopting PM GatiShakti’s approach.
Through the mechanism of PM National Master Plan 197 critical infrastructure gap projects have been identified and examined in sectors namely, the Ministry of Steel, Coal, Fertilizer as well as Food and Public Distribution under PM GatiShakti to improve logistics efficiency.
Over 1300 inter-ministerial issues were resolved in the 11 months through the PMG Portal integrated with the National Master Plan.
The Minister also launched the Logistics Ease Across Different States (LEADS) 2022 survey report. The LEADS is an indigenous data-driven index to assess logistics infrastructure, services, and human resources across all 36 States and UTs.
By engaging with various end-user stakeholders, the LEADS acts as a feedback mechanism on the existing logistic capacities and draws recommendations for further improvement. The LEADS further uses the feedback evaluation to classify states on the scale of logistics ease currently present among them.
The LEADS 2022 has garnered more than 6500 responses from more than 2100 respondents across the country. Unlike the previous versions of LEADS which were based on ranking systems for all states, LEADS 2022 has adopted a classification-based grading, states have been now classified under four categories viz coastal states, hinterland/landlocked states, north-eastern states, and Union Territories.
For the assessment of how well a State or Union Territories has performed in comparison to the Top State/Union Territories within the specific cluster.
The LEADS 2022 survey report would assist PM Gatishakti National Master Plan (PMGS-NMP) and National Logistics Policy (NLP) to perform a network mapping of logistics infrastructure, services, and regulatory environment enabling State Governments to identify and fill the gaps and achieve data-driven multimodal connectivity. LEADS continues to act as a guiding & bridging mechanism for the identification of interventions enhancing logistics efficiency at State/Union Territories.
ALSO READ : Shop owners of Ganeshguri Municipal Market languishing as authorities stalled construction for years.
FIRST Business Portal addressing the potential of business capability of North East Region.
