Centre launches district version of PM GatiShakti plan

Union Minister of Commerce & Industry Piyush Goyal launched the district version of PM GatiShakti National Master Plan for 27 aspirational districts in the country on the occasion of completion of three years of PM GatiShakti. Speaking on the occasion, Goyal said Gatishakti is a super intelligent tool for infrastructure planning and that the district master plan will be expanded to cover more than 750 districts across the country in the next 18 months. The minister also launched the ‘Guidelines for Preparing City Logistics Plans for Indian Cities’ to help cities tailor their logistics planning to meet its unique vision, objectives, and local characteristics. He added that the PM GatiShakti is India's offering to the world of tomorrow where over 1,600 layers of data have been accumulated at the central and state levels for faster, better, and cost-effective planning of world class infrastructure. "This is going to be the technology that the world will use for their infra planning in the years to come," he said, adding India's urban planners, architects, engineers, international organisations that fund many of these projects would get confidence in India's infrastructure projects. Every data in PM GatiShakti is validated, double-checked and a mechanism has been introduced for periodic updation of the data, he said. The portal was developed by Gujarat-based BISAG-N (Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geoinformatics). "This GIS enabled platform will help save significant budget for the government and plan to build infrastructure with more efficiency due to its data-backed decision making process," Goyal said.