PIB TrackerGatiShakti at five: 421 projects worth Rs 20.23 lakh crore appraised
The master plan now spans 58 ministries and all 36 States and UTs, and the authority that will appraise projects above Rs 500 crore was cleared a week ago.
What happened
- PM GatiShakti National Master Plan completed five years since its launch in October 2021, built indigenously by BISAG-N.
- The Network Planning Group has evaluated more than 400 projects worth about Rs 20.23 lakh crore, reaching 421 in 2026.
- Coverage is 58 central ministries and departments and all 36 States and UTs, with more than 65 tools and over 100 applications.
- The phases: 71 projects in 2022-23, 1,463 data layers and all States onboarded in 2023-24, the District Master Plan in 2024-25, the public platform in 2025-26.
- The Integrated Transport and Logistics Authority, approved by the Cabinet, is to take over appraisal, monitoring and impact assessment for transport and logistics.
For Prelims
- PM GatiShakti: launched 13 October 2021 as a GIS-based national master plan for integrated infrastructure planning, built on seven engines - roads, railways, ports, waterways, airports, mass transport and logistics infrastructure.
- Its six principles: integrated development, multimodal connectivity, last-mile connectivity, expedited land acquisition, minimised clearances and reduced ecological impact - the checklist against which the Network Planning Group appraises.
- Network Planning Group: the inter-ministerial body that examines every major infrastructure proposal for conformity with the master plan before it proceeds - the institutional device that makes a map binding.
- BISAG-N: the Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics, under MeitY, which builds the government’s geospatial platforms - the reason this is an indigenous system rather than a licensed one.
- National Logistics Policy, 2022: the companion policy aiming to cut logistics costs as a share of GDP, with GatiShakti as its planning arm and the Unified Logistics Interface Platform as its data arm.
- District Master Plan: the extension of the same method below the State level, so that a district can see every planned asset on one map - which is where social infrastructure like schools and health centres enters the system.
- Why a data layer matters: each layer is one dataset on the common map - a pipeline network, a forest boundary, a power line. Clearances and alignment disputes are usually caused by two agencies holding different versions of the same geography.
- Integrated Transport and Logistics Authority: the special purpose vehicle approved in October 2026 for a National Transport Master Plan, technical appraisal of projects above Rs 500 crore and a National Transport Data Repository.
For UPSC: A five-year record for the government’s central infrastructure-planning reform, with the appraisal count, the coverage and the institutional next step all in one release. Deploy it on infrastructure planning and multimodal logistics, on whole-of-government coordination as an administrative reform, and as practice in noticing when two official documents give different counts for the same thing.
What it is NOT: The release gives no evaluation of outcomes: no time saved, no cost avoided, no project realigned as a result of appraisal, which is what a five-year review of a planning platform should contain. No breakdown of the 421 projects by sector or State, and no indication of how many were modified or rejected. The data-layer discrepancy with the previous day’s backgrounder is unexplained. And no figure for logistics cost as a share of GDP, which is the headline metric the companion policy was built around.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.9 · GS2.10 · Linkage L1
Anchor
PM GatiShakti completed five years, with the Network Planning Group having evaluated 421 infrastructure projects worth about Rs 20.23 lakh crore against the master plan’s principles.
Substantiation (data)
The appraisal count compounds: 71 projects in 2022-23, 121 by 2024-25, 352 by February 2026 and 421 now, averaging roughly Rs 4,800 crore a project. Coverage runs to 58 central ministries and all 36 States and Union Territories, with more than 65 tools and over 100 applications built on the platform, which BISAG-N developed indigenously.
Position
The achievement is not the map, it is the obligation to consult it. India’s infrastructure coordination problem was never a shortage of plans; it was that a highway alignment, a pipeline and a forest boundary existed in three agencies’ files and met for the first time at the construction site. A standing group that must clear a project against a common geospatial base converts coordination from a meeting into a condition.
Counterpoint
Appraisal counts are inputs. A five-year review that reports how many projects were examined, and not one instance of an alignment changed, a clearance avoided or a crossing redesigned, is measuring its own activity. The same gap shows in the data-layer figure: more than 1,800 here, over 23,493 in the previous day’s backgrounder, with no definition in either to reconcile them.
Way forward
The Integrated Transport and Logistics Authority is where this gets tested next, because it will appraise projects above Rs 500 crore and build a National Transport Data Repository from e-way bills, FASTag and Vahan. That repository would let the same institution report actual freight movement rather than evaluations completed.
Conclusion
Five years in, the platform is built, the ministries are on it and the appraisals are running. The next five have to show what the appraisals changed.
Deploys into: Infrastructure planning and multimodal logistics · Whole-of-government coordination · Geospatial platforms in governance · Reading inconsistent official figures
Ministry of Commerce & Industry · 2026-10-13 · PRID 2322825 · PIB source ↗