New Delhi: The process of taking the PM Gatishakti National Master Plan (NMP), which was started three years ago on October 13, to the next phase has now begun. On the initiative of the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), PM Gatishakti will now be used at the district level. Therefore, PM Gatishakti District Master Plan Portal (DMP) is being prepared.

The advantage of this will be that different departments in that district will not have to dig again and again to restore their facilities. By all the departments working together to prepare the infrastructure project on the DMP portal, there will be no hindrance in construction. This will reduce both time and cost.

At present, various departments like electricity, water, communication dig the same road again and again for their work. At the same time, while preparing the infrastructure, due to lack of coordination and geographical information among the departments, both time and money are wasted and many times many projects get stuck.

DPIIT Secretary Amardeep Singh Bhatia said on Saturday that a pilot project is being started soon for the use of PM Gatishakti in one district of all the states. An agreement has been signed with the states for this work. This will bring a lot of changes in the district and Nagar Panchayat.

PM Gatishakti is a highly developed Geographic Information System (GIS)-enabled platform to which all the departments of the Central Government and the States are connected. Various infrastructure projects like road, port, rail worth more than Rs 500 crore are evaluated on the PM Gatishakti platform.

On this portal, even before a physical survey, it is known how many forests, residential, industrial areas will be in the way of the project and what obstacles will come in its way. Accordingly, projects are prepared keeping those problems in mind.

Recently, the Pune-Bengaluru Expressway was reviewed under the NMP of PM Gatishakti and the benefit of this was that the distance of this expressway was reduced from 841 km to 787 km. In the last three years, 208 infrastructure projects worth Rs 15.39 lakh crore have been evaluated on the Gatishakti portal.

Bhatia said that PM Gatishakti is also being used to collect data of land available in the states. The private sector will also be able to use it on a limited scale for industrial development and ease of doing business. He said that Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have also signed an agreement with India for the use of PM Gatishakti in infrastructure development.