The 2022 Union Budget has announced a wide-ranging overhaul of India’s export facing industrial framework. India has a range of industrial estates, zones, and Special Economic Zones which lack synergies between them. As a result, integrating India with global supply chains has proven to be a daunting task. The 2022 Union Budget deals with two of two of the most important factors behind India’s lagging global competitiveness- logistics and supply chain integration. While logistics under the PM Gati Shakti Master Plan has garnered deep attention, the decision to do away with the existing SEZ Act and a bring a new legislation will provide a fillip to supply chain integration. A single legislation will now bring India’s myriad industrial estates and SEZs under its ambit, providing coordinated commercial interlinkages to be built. Simultaneously, sweeping changes have been introduced in India’s customs administration in SEZs. Customs administration will be fully IT-driven, and function on the customs national portal. Further, customs rates have been slashed on key exports such as gems and gemstones, which has come as a welcome move for industry bodies. India’s exports have been on an upswing in the months preceding the budget, notwithstanding global tailwinds. Reforms within the 2022 Union Budget will be instrumental in bringing structural changes towards making Indian exports globally competitive.
PM GatiShakti is based on six pillars:
1. Comprehensiveness: It will include all the existing and planned initiatives of various ministries and departments with one centralized portal. Each and every department will now have visibility of each other’s activities providing critical data while planning and execution of projects in a comprehensive manner.
2. Prioritisation: Through this, different departments will be able to prioritize their projects through cross–sectoral interactions.
3. Optimisation: The National Master Plan will assist different ministries in planning for projects after identification of critical gaps. For the transportation of the goods from one place to another, the plan will help in selecting the most optimum route in terms of time and cost.
4. Synchronisation: Individual ministries and departments often work in silos. There is lack of coordination in planning and implementation of the project resulting in delays. PM GatiShakti will help in synchronizing the activities of each department, as well as of different layers of governance, in a holistic manner by ensuring coordination of work between them.
5. Analytical: The plan will provide the entire data at one place with GIS based spatial planning and analytical tools having 200+ layers, enabling better visibility to the executing agency.
6. Dynamic: All ministries and departments will now be able to visualize, review and monitor the progress of cross-sectoral projects, through the GIS platform, as the satellite imagery will give on-ground progress periodically and progress of the projects will be updated on a regular basis on the portal. It will help in identifying the vital interventions for enhancing and updating the master plan.
PM GatiShakti is the result of Prime Minister’s constant endeavour to build Next Generation Infrastructure which improves Ease of Living as well as Ease of Doing Business.
This blog has been authored by Ankita Sharma.
