The time invested in paperwork will reduce considerably since that part of the task too would be better organized and proceed in a time bound manner. The time saved would entail that project delays are a thing of the past and so are cost overruns, says Pankaj Vatsa, Executive Director - Highways, Buildings and Aviation, Egis India.

How will Gati Shakti help in catalyzing building and construction of infrastructure projects?
The objective of Gati Shakti is to create a single platform to ease the flow of communication between different project stakeholders. In any infrastructure project the main bottleneck happens owing to communication lag between multiple departments. Owing to this getting the requisite approvals and records turns out to be a herculean task. Second is there are conflicting priorities, let’s say a concerned department begins a road project and for some reason a utility project needs to come up in the same place then there is a mix-up. Earlier, there was no single platform where departments could avoid such occurrences, thanks to the Gati Shakti portal, now there is! Likewise in the long run it will also avoid project delays and cost overruns which occur owing to delays of different kinds like environmental clearances, land clearances, etc.

Moving on, how do you believe it will impact the implementation of the National Infrastructure pipeline?
Right from planning to the execution, Gati Shakti will impact every stage. For e.g when a Greenfield airport is being planned, all the issues right from availability of land and requisite clearances to what should be done about environmental clearances and rehabilitation of people will be mapped by different departments. Since all this information will be streamlined and made available on one single portal it will impact the pace of the project execution. It won’t be necessary to run from one department to another to get the required information or the clearances. The time invested in paperwork will reduce considerably since that part of the task too would be better organized and proceed in a time bound manner. The time saved would entail that project delays are a thing of the past and so are cost overruns.

Are there any early successes of Ghati Shakti initiative across different sectors or as also airports that you may want to make a mention of?
In due time there will be results to analyze, study and display but for now a number of projects that Egis is involved in, like the National Highway Bharatmala Program some of which projects are in the DPR stage Gati Shakti has added a lot of momentum. It is making the process simpler and faster and easier. Earlier the idea was to go on-site, collect data, meet the different authorities and then come back to them with other options if they were not satisfied with existing ones. This back and forth was time consuming now all of this happened on the portal and everyone is in the know, so this has directly impacted the speed at which these projects are getting executed.

Gati Shakti involves projects of massive size and skill, for hassle free project implementation of projects in the long run, what needs to be done?
Any tool is as good as the people who use it, so adequate training and capacity building is the key. People across different department need to be given necessary training to use the portal correctly; otherwise I don’t see any other challenges. At a later point in time when there is enough data at hand from the portal to analyse and arrive at deductions there will be room for improvisations. Gati Shakti is a game changer for infrastructure sector.

Technologically again because of the size and the scale of the projects technologically are we empowered to the right extent to bring these engineering marvels to life in the defined timelines?
The tools and technologies are available in the market but adoption of technologies across different departments is not uniform. Some departments like the Metro Railway have been quick to adopt newer technologies for the rest it’s a work in progress.