Opinion | From Satellite Images To Strategic Decisions: How Modi’s GatiShakti Is Bringing Technology Into Governance

Launched in 2021 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan uses a single digital map to coordinate infrastructure planning across ministries

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For decades, an engineer drawing a new highway in India worked from maps that showed nothing of the railway’s plans, the forest department’s boundaries or the gas pipeline already running under the fields. Because every ministry kept its records to itself, clashes surfaced only on site. A road laid one year would be dug up the next for a telecom cable, and a rail line would need a new route after surveyors ran into a forest that appeared on nobody’s drawings.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched PM GatiShakti on October 13, 2021, he blamed this on departments planning in silos and said India had so far lacked a holistic plan for its infrastructure. Five years later, the government’s fix is a single digital map that every department works from.

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That map, formally the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan, was built in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, by the Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics, or BISAG-N, an institute under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The platform sets data from across government over satellite imagery. As of October 12, 2026, it held 23,493 data layers and covered 58 central ministries and departments and all 36 states and Union Territories.

India’s digital transformation is usually measured through tools citizens hold, such as Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, transfers and DigiLocker documents. GatiShakti carries the same approach into the state’s own planning, where officials decide the routes of roads, railways, pipelines and power lines.

What officials can now see

An official who opens the platform sees a proposed project against everything already on the ground, from highways and rail........

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