Twenty-five years of reshaping how state thinks about infrastructure

5 min readOct 26, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Oct 26, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST

In over 25 years in public life, first as Gujarat chief minister and then Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has led a major expansion of infrastructure. The transformation of Gujarat’s infrastructure during his tenure as CM is an important part of the state’s development story. At the national level, too, the transformation has been truly momentous. India’s airport network has more than doubled. The railway system has seen major expansion and modernisation, from dedicated freight corridors and electrification to the high-quality experience offered by Vande Bharat trains and redeveloped railway stations. National highways have expanded substantially, and new expressways, ports and metro systems have transformed the country’s connectivity landscape.

While these changes have rightly attracted considerable attention, a more fundamental change that Modi’s governance brought about is the paradigm shift in how infrastructure is conceptualised, planned and delivered. Previously, infrastructure creation was approached in a piecemeal manner, with a ministry, department or agency responsible for individual projects. Citizens or businesses, however, do not experience infrastructure along departmental lines. A person commuting to work, a farmer transporting crops to a mandi, or a manufacturer managing a supply chain relies on roads, railways, ports, water, and power as an integrated system. When even one link in this chain is weak or missing, the return on every other investment and ease of living suffers. Rather than looking at infrastructure solely through the lens of the department responsible for delivering a particular asset, Modi focuses on the larger outcome it is meant to achieve. This outcome-oriented, citizen-centric perspective has been a hallmark of his approach to administration.

We can see the beginnings of this approach in his tenure in Gujarat. Initiatives such as Pragati Path, Pravasi Path, Vikas Path and Kisan Path were designed around distinct connectivity requirements. The development of Special Investment Regions, including the Dholera Special Investment Region, brought together land, infrastructure and connectivity with the objective of creating large economic nodes. Modi’s idea was to plan infrastructure in relation to how people lived, where their livelihoods were located, where industry could develop and how goods needed to move.

Did government departments not coordinate before Gati Shakti? Of course they did. But there is a fundamental difference between the coordination that governments have traditionally practised and the approach Gati Shakti seeks to institutionalise. Instead of discovering interdependencies when they spark a conflict on the ground, planners now identify them while projects are still on the drawing board. Before a road is designed, what else is slated for that corridor? If a port is meant to serve a wider region, how will its hinterland be connected, and can these investments be sequenced so that one is ready the moment the other goes live? The Gati Shakti approach helped discover such interdependencies and mitigate conflicts, which helped plan projects in such a way that it optimised the costs.

While it is tempting to describe Gati Shakti as an infrastructure reform, it is much more than that. It is a shift in how the government thinks about public investment. Indian businesses compete in global markets where logistics costs, reliability and delivery times affect the final price of a product. As India enters into new trade agreements and seeks to deepen its participation in global supply chains, the ability to move raw materials and finished goods efficiently becomes an important part of competitiveness. Reducing logistics costs, therefore, cannot be separated from the way roads, railways, ports, waterways, warehouses and industrial locations are planned together.

Planning is only one part of the challenge; effective execution is equally important. Infrastructure projects can encounter a range of bottlenecks during implementation, whether related to land acquisition, statutory clearances, shifting of utilities, law and order, or coordination between different ministries and between the Centre and the states. PRAGATI was conceived to address these challenges by bringing the relevant authorities together to review projects, resolve implementation issues and accelerate delivery.

Together, Gati Shakti and PRAGATI illustrate a defining feature of Modi’s approach to administration: The ability to see the larger system while remaining attentive to the specific bottlenecks that can hold up an individual project.

Ultimately, the significance of Modi’s 25 years in public office lies not just in the physical assets built on the ground, but in how he has reshaped the way the state thinks about infrastructure itself. A state that takes a system-level approach, firmly anchored on providing a seamless experience to citizens and improving the productivity of the wider economy.

The writer is member, NITI Aayog and a former cabinet secretary