India’s institutional architecture for infrastructure
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Arihant Kumar
Since Independence, infrastructure has shaped India’s idea of progress. The vision was clear: railways would bind distant regions, highways would carry commerce across states, dams would anchor energy and irrigation, and power lines would bring light to the farthest villages. As projects grew larger, they also grew more entangled. Land waited for clearance, clearances waited for designs, designs waited for utilities to shift, and utilities waited for approvals buried in another office, another jurisdiction, another file. Each delay had a reason, each reason had an owner, and yet no one truly owned the outcome. For years, many projects lived fragmented lives which were reviewed in isolation, explained in hindsight, and delayed in perpetuity. When progress stalled, responsibility dissolved into process. There was motion everywhere, but momentum nowhere.
What was missing was not intent or investment, but a forum where interlinked constraints could be seen together, resolved together, and driven to closure. It was this quiet but consequential gap in project governance that the PRAGATI-led ecosystem set out to fill.
PRAGATI arrived not as a new layer of review, but as a junction where parallel tracks finally met. Conceived in 2015, it carried a deceptively simple idea: that monitoring must lead to decisions, and decisions must end in delivery. (To be contd)
Since Independence, infrastructure has shaped India’s idea of progress. The vision was clear: railways would bind distant regions, highways would carry commerce across states, dams would anchor energy and irrigation, and power lines would bring light to the farthest villages. As projects grew larger, they also grew more entangled. Land waited for clearance, clearances waited for designs, designs waited for utilities to shift, and utilities waited for approvals buried in another office, another jurisdiction, another file. Each delay had a reason, each reason had an owner, and yet no one truly owned the outcome. For years, many projects lived fragmented lives which were reviewed in isolation, explained in hindsight, and delayed in perpetuity. When progress stalled, responsibility dissolved into process. There was motion everywhere, but momentum nowhere.
What was missing was not intent or investment, but a forum where interlinked constraints could be seen together, resolved together, and driven to closure. It was this quiet but consequential gap in project governance that the PRAGATI-led ecosystem set out to fill.
PRAGATI arrived not as a new layer of review, but as a junction where parallel tracks finally met. Conceived in 2015, it carried a deceptively simple idea: that monitoring must lead to decisions, and decisions must end in delivery. (To be contd)