PM Modi Asks Union Secretaries to Focus on Ease of Doing Business, Ease of Living and Self-Reliance

The official rhetoric of “breaking silos” hides a huge, messy puzzle: how do you get India’s enormous administrative machinery to talk to itself?

What the Prime Minister is talking about when he talks about “integrated planning", if you peel back the corporate-sounding jargon, is a frustration each and every citizen and business owner knows all too well.

The Core Challenge: Rewiring the Bureaucracy’s DNA

For decades, Indian governance was a patchwork of independent kingdoms. One ministry would build a brand new tarmac road for the telecom or sewage department to dig it up two weeks later to lay cables or pipes. "A logistical nightmare, a waste of tax money and a headache for residents.

The demand for the use of PM Gati Shakti is a direct effort to stop this farce. It’s basically putting 80 different ministries on one digital map so everyone can see what the other is doing before anyone breaks ground.”

. Ease of Living: How We Are Defining It

When top officials talk about "ease of living", it sounds abstract. But on the ground that means eliminating the unnecessary friction that makes everyday life annoying.

Less paperwork – it’s about changing the old “come back tomorrow with three more forms” culture to digital, automated approvals.

Shifting the Goalposts Bureaucracy is being pushed to stop measuring success by how much money they spent from the budget and start measuring it by how fast a project actually got finished and if it made a citizen’s life easier.

. To make self-reliance more than a word

For the 80 union secretaries sitting in that room, the directive on Atmanirbharta (self-reliance) is a practical marching order. That is, studying the rulebooks. If local red tape makes it easier for an Indian business to import a component from abroad than to manufacture it locally, that red tape must go.

The Friction of Execution: India rarely lacks big ideas or capital; its problem is the speedbump of execution.

The idea is to bring together the country’s best civil servants and connect them to shared digital platforms to run the state less like a lumbering, paper-laden bureaucracy and more like a team in sync, where the left hand finally knows what the right hand is doing.