PM GatiShakti Portal’s door may open for private firms

The infrastructure platform is currently accessible only to government departments and state agencies.

Discussions are underway to give limited access to private sector companies, said Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) secretary Amardeep Singh Bhatia on Saturday. He said sensitive data on the NMP won’t be accessible.

“We are identifying those. We will do a consultation with the private sector also. Discussions are on and details will be worked out. We are targeting to roll out this year,” Bhatia said at an event marking the completion of three years of PM GatiShakti.

The programme seeks to develop integrated infrastructure to reduce logistics costs.

All logistics and connectivity infrastructure projects, entailing investments of over Rs 500 crore are now routed through the Network Planning Group (NPG) constituted under the PM GatiShakti initiative launched on October 13, 2021.

Bhatia said that over 1,600 layers of data, including those related to land, ports, forests, and highways, are available on the portal that’s open to the Centre and states for planning and implementation of infrastructure projects.

The idea of opening PM GatiShakti NMP was discussed in July.

Framework in Works
A committee was formed for technical evaluation of the National Geoscience Data Repository (NGDR) and the Unified Geospatial Interface platform developed by the Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics (BISAG-N) for data sharing.

The DPIIT and Gujarat-based BISAG-N are expected to prepare a framework for providing registered access to users on the NGDR platform and also to provide certain data layers as non-restricted and indicated by ministries in a view-only format. The DPIIT is working with states for the integration of updated land record data and will roll out the initiative at the district level in the next one to two months.

Bhatia said that Nepal and Sri Lanka have shown interest in this initiative. “With Sri Lanka, we are working out things,” he said. As per the secretary, 208 big-ticket infrastructure projects of different ministries including roads and railways worth ₹15.39 lakh crore have been recommended for approval under the PM GatiShakti initiative so far.