Business
Somewhere in the machinery of the Indian state is a meeting no one wants to be summoned to. The moment you are called means you are behind your schedule‚ and you must explain why to the Prime Minister of the country and in presence of every state and central government official who matters․ This is PRAGATI (Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation), Narendra Modi’s flagship platform․ And it has quietly become one of the most powerful governance tools in the developing world․
Before PRAGATI‚ the backlog of infrastructure projects was an economic wound․ India lost money and lost growth because of these delays.
Soumitra Dutta‚ former dean of Oxford Said Business School and co-author of a comprehensive study on PRAGATI, noted‚ "If a large part of the country's population is not able to access those kinds of services (bridges or airports, for example)‚ then essentially you're not having an inclusive economy or inclusive society․"
When he was Chief Minister of Gujarat‚ Modi used SWAGAT (State Wide Attention on Grievances by Application of Technology) to unblock specific stalled projects by holding state government officials accountable. After becoming the country's Prime Minister, Modi carried this idea to Delhi‚ where he created the PRAGATI system, a digital platform that fast tracks government projects and addresses public grievances.
Consider the story of the Chenab Bridge․ Now the world's highest rail bridge, in Jammu and Kashmir, and spanning a gorge, it had crawled for years before it got included in the PRAGATI system․ What had been stuck in the amber of bureaucratic inaction became‚ under the PRAGATI spotlight‚ a national priority․ The completed Chenab Bridge today is a part of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link, which is connecting Kashmir to the rest of India by railway.
Soumitra Dutta, who’s an AI scholar and co-creator of the Network Readiness Index, calls PRAGATI a social and economic game-changer, and what impressed him most while talking to senior government officials about it for the study was the transformative impact on culture․ They were not bureaucrats in the traditional sense any longer, he observed. They were acting much more like private sector leaders: trying to look at decision-making‚ working hard‚ coordinating‚ communicating‚ working together․
The PRAGATI success story has lessons to offer to the rest of the world․ Some African countries have similar infrastructure gridlock caused by multiple authorities‚ lack of data‚ and absence of systematic trade-off analyses․ Dutta, who’s co-founder of the think tank Portulans Institute and co-creator of the Global Innovation Index, argues that the principles behind PRAGATI can be generalized and used even in countries that lack India's technological ecosystem․ The coordination logic‚ the accountability design‚ the leadership commitment -- these are the ingredients․ Digital tools are simply the accelerant.