Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday said that the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan and the National Logistics Policy (NLP) will together greatly help both businesses and people, improve competitiveness, boost foreign investment and give the world confidence that India is on the rise.

Piyush Goyal was addressing the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) National Conference on GatiShakti here. He appreciated the ICC, which is based in Eastern India, for coming to Delhi to engage with an initiative as crucial as GatiShakti.

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The minister said the world today recognized India as a leader of innovation. India has been rapidly developing new tools for good governance, ease of living, and ease of doing business, such as PM GatiShakti National Master Plan.

He said that gone were the days when India had to wait for decades for new ideas and technology to emerge in the West and then adopt them to help businesses and people. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) framework was today an example of India’s technological prowess, and an initiative which has had a deep impact on the country’s economy.

He said that in December last year, India had clocked 7.28 billion digital financial transactions in one month, thanks to UPI. The world was now aspiring to adopt UPI for their digital financial transactions, he said.

The minister emphasised that India was second to none in technology and new ideas, and that the PM GatiShakti initiative was an example of this capability. He recalled how the Prime Minister, about 15 years ago, conceived the idea of using geospatial technology to plan infrastructure and set up BIZAG-N in Ahmedabad.

He pointed out that the PM actively engaged with BIZAG during its formative years and planned infrastructure in Gujarat using the data points generated by the institute. As a result, Gujarat is far ahead of many other areas in terms of quality and speed of infrastructure development, he observed.

The Minister went on to demystify PM GatiShakti, explaining that it created layers of data where different geological, ecological and infrastructural elements across the country were mapped and captured. Currently, there are about 1300 layers of data, consisting of forests, wildlife sanctuaries, rivers, UNESCO world heritage sites, among others, he said.

GatiShakti would not only address critical gaps in infrastructure but also help in planning social infrastructure such as schools, nursing homes and hospitals, he said.

The minister explained that the data layers of GatiShakti engage with each other through APIs, and if an alignment of a particular project was put into GatiShakti, it would highlight the challenges of implementation and help re-align the project, saving time and cost. He highlighted that 12 states have digitized their land records, which further strengthened the planning.

The minister said that no state has politicized GatiShakti, as it is an initiative that would help businesses, people and the economy as a whole. He said that reducing the cost of logistics was critical to achieving India’s goal of becoming a developed country by 2047.

PM GatiShakti, if used well, will help bring down logistics costs tremendously. He said that all highways, railways, ports, and airports were mapped on GatiShakti, which would help in building seamless connectivity networks and creating a positive impact on the logistics ecosystem.

The Minister lauded the Prime Minister’s efforts in galvanizing small and developing nations to demand a fair agreement in the interest of equity and balance between the developed and developing world, which was finally adopted in COP-21 in Paris.

He observed that every world leader today was looking up to India, and that there was no part of the globe that did not look up to PM Modi to find solutions to challenging global problems.

Goyal highlighted the success of the government in meeting the basic needs of life for its citizens, including food, clothing, shelter, health and education. He said that India’s healthcare program, Ayushman Bharat covered over 500 million people and said that the New Education Policy has been accepted and lauded across sections. These initiatives, he said, had made India’s population, especially the youth, highly aspirational.

The commerce and industry minister stressed that GatiShakti is a national approach that has come out of exhaustive consultations and collective, collaborative efforts of countless stakeholders. He expressed confidence that with the enthusiasm that he saw among people of the country and the turbo-powered work that is happening in several fields, India may surpass the mark of becoming a USD 32 trillion economy by 2047.