India's PM Gati Shakti project will grab factories in China: report
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New Delhi: It goes without saying, digging up a newly paved road for laying out telephone cable or water main are among the banes of India's infrastructure.
Lack of coordination between different departments creates mess at the expense of precious resources running to millions alongside overrunning project schedules.
These issues alongside other more vicious bottlenecks including red tapism have hauled back India's progress over the years.
Prime Minister Modi, according to a report in NDTV, believes in technology to be a solution for these perennial and noxious bottlenecks.
In order to pull it off, a 100-trillion-rupee ($1.2 trillion) mega project called "PM Gati Shakti" is under the anvil to create a digital platform to combine 16 ministries.
The portal will help investors and companies with one-stop solution for design of projects, seamless approvals, and easier estimation of costs.
Amrit Lal Meena, special secretary of logistics in the ministry of commerce and industry, reportedly said it is for implementing project without time and cost overruns.
The report says that fast-tracking project will give India an advantage as the world's production hub China still remain largely offlimits to world from the raging covid.
The situation makes companies to adopt what the report said "China-plus-one policy", to find other countries and sources to diversify their business and supply chain.
India fits the bill, according to the report, considering its talent pool, cheap labour and spread of English language despite its "rickety infrastructure" that keeps investors at bay.
Anshuman Sinha, a partner at Kearney India who leads transport and infrastructure practices, said "Gati Shakti is about making it easier to have a flow of goods and manufactured components across the length and breadth of the country."
Red tape is spoilsport for India's developmental projects and technology is crucial to " unclog" stalled infrastructure projects, according to the report.
Almost 40 per cent of 1,300 projects that Gati Shakti's portal currently oversees were delayed from land acquisition, forest, and environment clearances, resulting in cost overruns, according to report quoting Meena. The portal resolved problems in some 200 of those.
The government will ensure through Gat Shakti that roads once paved are not dug up again. The plan aims at creating infrastructure how Europe had done after the world wars or China did between1980 and 2010, according to the government agency, Invest India.