Mapping India's Infrastructure With Gati Shakti — Infravisioning With Vinayak Chatterjee

Vinayak Chatterjee: Gati Shakti is a platform and I find that most people in India, as you rightly pointed out, don't quite get what it is. In fact, on a lighter note, somebody told me, ‘Oh, it's a platform. It's a software program. I thought it was the name given to the program for having more high-speed trains. So that they move with Gati, and they move with Shakti.’ So, I said no, it has nothing to do with high-speed trains.

So, on a more serious note, let me explain simply what it is. It is fundamentally a GIS platform-based software platform. Now that itself is technically quite a mouthful. So simply what it means is that, think of your Google map when you're driving, and it is a single layer, which tells you how you can reach from your home to your office. That is called one layer, two-dimensional one layer.

Now think of many such layers sitting on top of each other. So Gati Shakti, now don't fall off your chair, has 1300 layers! So, it has 1300 layers. So now you will ask the question, why do we have 1300, because each layer signifies a particular linkage.

In an economic cluster, we use the word economic cluster in Gati Shakti, all that it means is places where economic activities happen, which in our case is India's towns and villages and industrial townships.

So, in that cluster, in that town, let us say Kanpur, where there is a road going all around Kanpur. So that is one layer. There are water pipelines underneath, that's one layer. There are gas pipelines, that's another layer. There's optic fibre, that's another layer on the ground.

On top of the ground stuff like, where are all the fuel pumps? How many landing strips or airports are there in the bigger cities? How many transmission towers are there on the land? So, each layer signifies a particular linkage broadly of utilities that have connectivity.

Now 1300 layers is the space required today and, in the future, to populate it with every kind of question that you may ask about a city or an economic cluster to say in that geographical area, show me all the linkages. So that is what Gati Shakti is about.

As I said, think of your Google Map with 1300 layers. So that's what it's called. It's a software GIS based platform. I would like to believe, and I will pause after this, I would like to believe that no other country in the world has as powerful a platform that documents and signifies such linkages that India has had to develop for itself.

It has been developed by study outfit. It is called BISAG, the full form is the Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics, located between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, that specialises in this kind of work. So, hats off for a rather mind bogglingly impactful platform.

Vinayak Chatterjee: Exactly, you said it and I am asking myself whether I really need to elucidate this because you said it very beautifully yourself. But yes, you hit the nail on the head. If I were setting up a new port, in the old days without Gati Shakti, I would give a sanction to the Ministry of Port and Shipping saying yes, build a new port on the east coast. Today, I don't do that.

I give a comprehensive sanction, which says here is the port and for the port to be functional and useful to the nation, I need road connectivity, I need rail connectivity, electricity, and evacuation infrastructure, all of that.

So, can I sanction the project holistically and involve all the other ministries and departments at the central, state, and local levels to move together so that the project is viable, because in the past, what we have seen is we have seen a large renewable project in the deserts of Rajasthan and lo and behold, the modules are in place, the sunlight is falling, electricity is being generated and the transmission lines are not in place.

Similarly, it happened with hydroelectric projects in the Northeast. The transmission networks were not there to evacuate, and nobody thought about it in time. This is about, shall we say, designing the project at the time of implementing the project.

Let us say that GIS has been used or the Gati Shakti platform has been used to design a road, which it has been, in fact, I have evidence that the roads that are being designed now, allow you on the platform to see all the places which have obstacles.

Do you have a river running? Do you have a gas pipeline crossing the alignment? Do you have electric transmission towers that need to be moved? Do you have a rail line where you have to build a railroad bridge? All these aspects come when you are designing a road in this country.

Till now, much of this was done physically by surveyors visiting it, documenting it on manual sheets of paper, but today you can sit in front of a computer screen and change the alignment to make it the most effective with minimal disturbance. So, this is the kind of stuff you can do.

Vinayak Chatterjee: So, I have had a chat with some of the people involved in this, in the cell in the Commerce Ministry which administers the Gati Shakti which is called the National Planning Group, and these are officers who are specially trained, drawn from different ministries.

So, there is a cross-cultural identity within the cell that they come from different relevant ministries, and they are being trained on the software to make it useful and data concerning roads, railways, ports, airports, power, telecom, petroleum and natural gas and renewable energy have been fully mapped on the platform.

Many other things will take time, you know, water pipelines will take time or something else will take time. But these are there, and the other good news is that there has been no political opposition. Opposition states have not said this is an imposition, we will not participate.

Everybody has seen the logic of participating and all 30 States and Union Territories have come on board and themselves are in the process of having developed or developing the mirror image portals at their local levels and at their state levels.

So, it's all falling into place and to answer your question, it is already in use. I mean, I will give you one or two examples. For example, I have been told the Chennai-Tuticorin Expressway, the 181-kilometre new railway line from Barbil, have been designed and sanctioned based on Gati Shakti. I think a week ago the ports minister went on record in the media to say that 100 port connectivity projects have been identified as being required by the Gati Shakti platform.

Now this is it important because India has the National Logistics Policy, where we are planning to bring down the logistics costs from 13% of GDP to 8% of GDP and one of the critical elements there is port connectivity. How quickly can we take goods in and out of the ports, many of them being in congested areas. So, Gati Shakti has identified 100 choke points, which the minister has publicly announced are being addressed.

So, you can see how the Gati Shakti is already getting into the DNA of our decision making.