Piyush Goyal, the Union Minister for Commerce and Industry, said on Thursday that the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan and the National Logistics Policy (NLP) will help both businesses and people a lot.
At the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) National Conference on GatiShakti, the Minister spoke to a group. Goyal thanked the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which is based in Eastern India, for coming to Delhi to take part in GatiShakti, which is a very important project.
The Minister said that India is now seen as a leader in innovation all over the world. He noticed that India is quickly making new tools for good government, making life easier, and making business easier. One example is the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan.
He said that India no longer had to wait decades for new ideas and technologies to come out in the West before it could use them to help businesses and people.
He used the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) framework as an example of how advanced India’s technology is. This project has had a big effect on the economy of the country. He also said that India had used UPI to do 7.28 billion digital financial transactions in one month last December. The Minister also said that everyone now wants to use UPI for digital money transfers.
He then took the mystery out of PM GatiShakti by explaining that it created layers of data by mapping and capturing different geological, ecological, and infrastructure features across the country.
He said that there are about 1300 layers of data, which include forests, wildlife sanctuaries, rivers, and UNESCO world heritage sites, among other things. He also said that GatiShakti would not only fill in critical infrastructure gaps, but also help plan social infrastructure like schools, nursing homes, hospitals, etc.
The Minister also said that GatiShakti’s data layers interact with each other through APIs. If an alignment of a particular project was put into GatiShakti, it would show the challenges of implementation and help re-align the project, saving time and money. He also said that the land in 12 states has been digitised, which makes planning even better.
He said that for India to reach its goal of becoming a developed country by 2047, logistics costs must go down. If PM GatiShakti is used well, it will help logistics costs go down a lot.
He pointed out that all highways, railways, ports, and airports were mapped on GatiShakti, which would help build networks with smooth connections and help the logistics ecosystem.
The Minister emphasised that GatiShakti is a national plan that came about after a lot of consultations and the joint work of many different groups.
He ended by saying that he was confident that India could do better than becoming a USD 32 trillion economy by 2047, based on the enthusiasm he saw in the people of the country and the fast-paced work going on in many fields.
