PM Gati Shakti brought team work to the fore, says DPIIT secy Anurag Jain

Exactly a year ago Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ambitious master plan 'PM Gati Shakti' with the aim to transform India's infrastructure sector. It brought multimodal connectivity bringing 16 ministries including the railways and roadways under one digital platform.

The key objective has been to provide integrated and seamless connectivity for the movement of goods and people across the country. The government envisages this programme to expedite India's goal to become a $20 trillion economy by 2040.

But how close are we to being able to realise some of those aspirations and what has the performance been like in year one? To talk about the road ahead  CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan spoke to Anurag Jain, Secretary for the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT).

Jain said the PM Gati Shakti plan has been one of the most successful programmes. Participation from all the central ministries, and all the states and UTs has been more than what had they were expecting.

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Talking about bottlenecks and hurdles he said, "If there are issues during implementation, they are raised by the implementing authority on the portal. The department which is supposed to solve the issue receives it seamlessly, then they resolve the issue. So the pace of resolution of the issue because of the team work has improved.”

He added that the key message that he feels in the past year is that departmental silos have been broken. "People have been working as a team in a never before-like situation. It's a great learning technological tool has connected all of us like never before. So it has changed the mindset of all the departments.”

Jain said initially they had not thought of putting the social sector in the picture. However, a month ago, the Prime Minister expressed that the Gati Shakti model can be taken forward for the social sector.