The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with fintech firm PhonePe on 20 August 2026 to bring insights from its enterprise data platform PhonePe PulsePro into the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan portal. Under the pact, aggregated and anonymised transaction metrics from PulsePro will be integrated into the portal that is managed with Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics (BISAG-N). The collaboration aims to make hyperlocal, near real time economic signals available for government planners to support national infrastructure planning, economic analysis and holistic urban and rural development.
What Does the MeitY-PhonePe Agreement Involve?
The MoU was announced in Bengaluru on 20 August 2026 between MeitY and PhonePe, with PhonePe PulsePro as the data partner for the PM GatiShakti mission. The core commitment is that metrics and market signals generated by PulsePro will be made accessible inside the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan portal for internal government use. The portal itself is developed and managed in collaboration with BISAG-N, an autonomous scientific society under MeitY, and hosted on MEGHRAJ, the Government of India cloud, using open source Geographic Information System (GIS) technology.
According to the partners, the integration will not share individual customer data. Instead, it will provide aggregated and anonymised transaction trends that reveal real world economic activity at a granular level, down to district and postal code clusters. S. Krishnan, Secretary, MeitY, noted that such data driven intelligence can complement existing official datasets and give planners better visibility into emerging trends across markets and geographies. Karthik Raghupathy, Head of Strategy at PhonePe, said that transaction led insights from Pulse and now PulsePro can help build a more nuanced understanding of markets and support evidence based infrastructure planning.
The government described the move as part of building a stronger data ecosystem for infrastructure and contributing to the broader vision of Viksit Bharat or Developed India by 2047. The data will be used only for planning and analysis, with privacy safeguards that ensure no user IDs, names, phone numbers or individual merchant identities are present in PulsePro tables.
What Is PhonePe PulsePro?
PhonePe PulsePro is an enterprise data intelligence platform launched by PhonePe on 30 July 2026. It converts aggregated and anonymised digital payment trends from PhonePe’s payments network into hyperlocal, near real time market insights for businesses, institutions and now government planning. The term pulse here refers to the pulse of India’s digital economy, meaning the live picture of how consumers spend and merchants transact.
The platform is built on the scale of PhonePe’s ecosystem, which covers more than 700 million registered users, over 50 million registered merchants, and 99 percent of India’s postal codes. It draws on more than 200 store categories and over 100 market signals to map category performance, consumer spending patterns, store format shifts and digital ecosystem indicators such as quick commerce penetration. Importantly, it offers insights at a granularity of up to 40 metre by 40 metre hotspots, as well as at district and postal code levels, allowing for precise demand mapping.
PhonePe PulsePro offers three main intelligence suites:
| Intelligence Module | What It Tracks | Typical Use |
|---|---|---|
| Category and Growth Intelligence | Macro and micro market trends, consumer spending, category performance across 200 plus store types, over 100 market signals | Understanding which product categories are growing, where demand is rising or shifting |
| Retail Network Intelligence | High potential markets, distribution network optimisation, urban whitespace opportunities, rural expansion prioritisation | Deciding where to expand stores, warehouses or distribution centres |
| Hyperlocal and Location Intelligence | District and postal code insights, site selection signals, transaction density, digital adoption indicators | Choosing the exact site for a new outlet or logistics point and tracking local digital behaviour |
The platform emphasises privacy by design. Insights are compiled through broad consumer cohorts, transaction density is measured without accessing store level data, and no individual identities are stored. PulsePro builds on the earlier PhonePe Pulse, a free and open data platform launched in 2021 that has been widely used by entrepreneurs, researchers, policymakers and students. While Pulse remains free and open access, PulsePro is an enterprise grade extension with deeper analytics and near real time signals. PhonePe itself was founded in December 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer, is headquartered in Bengaluru, and is backed by Walmart after its separation from Flipkart in December 2022. It remains India’s largest Unified Payments Interface (UPI) player, processing close to half of all UPI transactions.
Understanding the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan
The PM GatiShakti National Master Plan (PMGS-NMP) is the central government’s flagship programme for integrated infrastructure planning. It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 13 October 2021 at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, and approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs on 21 October 2021. The plan was announced earlier in the Independence Day address of 2021 as a ₹100 lakh crore initiative to build holistic infrastructure and to power India’s aim of becoming a $5 trillion economy and later a developed nation by 2047.
The idea behind GatiShakti, which literally means speed and power, is to break departmental silos. Earlier, different ministries planned roads, railways, ports, airports and industrial zones in isolation, which led to duplication, delays and high logistics costs. GatiShakti brings this planning onto a single digital platform so that every project is designed with a common vision and coordinated execution.
The plan is driven by seven engines: Railways, Roads, Ports, Waterways, Airports, Mass Transport and Logistics Infrastructure. Around these engines, economic zones such as industrial corridors, defence corridors, electronic parks, pharmaceutical clusters, fishing clusters and agricultural zones have been mapped. The objective is to ensure seamless multimodal connectivity and last mile links, so that people, goods and services move efficiently.
The Technology Backbone: Role of BISAG-N
The digital heart of GatiShakti is a GIS based National Master Plan portal developed by BISAG-N. BISAG-N stands for Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics. It is an Autonomous Scientific Society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, under MeitY, with headquarters near CH ‘0’ Circle, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. It was elevated to national status by the Union Cabinet on 19 February 2020, from its earlier form as a Gujarat state agency under the Department of Science and Technology.
BISAG-N specialises in space technology, remote sensing, satellite communication, photogrammetry, cartography, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), artificial intelligence and geo-spatial solutions. For GatiShakti, it built a dynamic GIS platform using open source technologies, hosted securely on MEGHRAJ, which integrates satellite imagery from ISRO and basemaps from the Survey of India. The portal initially integrated more than 200 GIS layers, and by 2024 it had expanded to over 1,600 layers, including 585 layers from central ministries and more than 870 layers from states and Union Territories. It now onboards 44 central ministries and 36 states and Union Territories, and offers tools for route planning, proximity measurement, identification of go or no go areas, obtaining no objection certificates, and dashboard based monitoring.
Individual ministries are given login IDs and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to update their data regularly, with support from BISAG-N and the Logistics Division of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Institutional Framework Behind GatiShakti
GatiShakti works on six pillars: comprehensiveness, prioritisation, optimisation, synchronisation, analytical capability and dynamism. To make these operational, a three tier institutional structure was created.
At the top is the Empowered Group of Secretaries (EGoS), chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, comprising secretaries of 18 to 23 infrastructure and user ministries. It reviews and monitors implementation and prescribes norms for amendments to the Master Plan. Below it is the Network Planning Group (NPG), which includes heads of network planning divisions of eight infrastructure ministries. The NPG examines projects for integrated planning before they go to the EGoS. It is supported by a Technical Support Unit (TSU) of domain experts, with the Logistics Division, DPIIT acting as its secretariat. For monitoring of delays and regulatory bottlenecks, the portal has also been integrated with the Project Monitoring Group (PMG).
This whole of government and cooperative federalism approach is complemented by other digital initiatives such as the National Logistics Policy 2022, the Unified Logistics Interface Platform (ULIP), the Ease of Logistics Services (E-Logs) portal, and the GatiShakti Sanchar portal launched on 14 May 2022 for centralised Right of Way approvals for telecom infrastructure.
Why Does This Integration Matter?
India’s logistics cost has historically been high, estimated at about 13 to 14 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), compared to 8 to 10 percent in many developed economies. A recent DPIIT and National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) assessment pegged it at 7.97 percent of GDP and 9.09 percent of non services output in 2023-24, amounting to about ₹24.01 lakh crore, and noted that growth in logistics cost is slowing due to initiatives like GatiShakti, dedicated freight corridors, Bharatmala and Sagarmala. The National Logistics Policy, launched on 17 September 2022, targets bringing logistics costs close to global benchmarks by 2030, improving India’s Logistics Performance Index ranking into the top 25, and creating a data driven decision support system. High logistics costs reduce export competitiveness and increase prices for consumers and farmers.
In that context, adding transaction led market intelligence to GatiShakti addresses a critical gap. Physical infrastructure data shows where roads or warehouses exist, but payment data shows where economic activity is actually happening, where consumption is rising, and where demand is unmet. For example, dense transaction signals in a rural postal code can flag rising purchasing power that justifies a new logistics park, cold storage or last mile road connection. Hyperlocal insights on store categories can guide placement of industrial clusters, retail networks and multimodal logistics parks being planned under the Comprehensive Logistics Action Plan.
For government planners, this offers several advantages. It allows more precise prioritisation of projects, better optimisation of existing assets, and synchronisation across ministries by revealing real demand patterns rather than relying only on surveys or census data. For the private sector, the government’s parallel move to launch PM GatiShakti Public access with 230 approved datasets shows a push to democratise planning data, and private data partnerships like PulsePro enrich that ecosystem. For citizens, better placed infrastructure means faster movement of goods, lower prices, reduced wastage in supply chains, and more balanced urban and rural development.
The partnership is also significant as an example of public private data collaboration. MeitY, as the nodal ministry for information technology, electronics, internet governance, e-governance and cyber laws, plays a central role in India’s digital economy and in initiatives like Digital India. Bringing a fintech’s anonymised commercial data into a sovereign planning platform demonstrates how Digital India can use data for public good while retaining privacy safeguards and internal use restrictions.
The Way Forward
The immediate next step is the technical integration of PulsePro metrics into the GatiShakti portal through APIs managed with BISAG-N, and training of planners in ministries and states to interpret the new layers. As more states and districts onboard the District Master Plan portal, which is being rolled out in phases after a beta launch in 28 aspirational districts in September 2024, hyperlocal transaction data could become especially useful for decentralised planning.
Over time, the success of this model will depend on three factors. First, data quality and coverage must remain representative, since PhonePe’s network, though vast, reflects digital payment users and may under represent cash heavy or remote areas. Second, privacy and governance frameworks must stay robust, with clear rules on aggregation, anonymisation, retention and audit, in line with the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the emerging data protection regime. Third, interoperability with other data sources such as ULIP, GSTN, and the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan Dashboard and Knowledge Management System launched in October 2025 will determine whether insights translate into faster clearances, timely project execution and measurable reduction in logistics costs.
If these challenges are managed, transaction intelligence could become a regular input for deciding where to build the next highway link, where to site a multimodal logistics park, or how to sequence rural connectivity with market growth, making infrastructure planning more anticipatory than reactive.
Key Takeaways
- MeitY signed an MoU with PhonePe on 20 August 2026 to integrate PhonePe PulsePro metrics into the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan portal.
- PhonePe PulsePro, launched on 30 July 2026, is an enterprise platform that provides aggregated and anonymised hyperlocal insights from more than 700 million users and over 50 million merchants across 99 percent of postal codes.
- The GatiShakti portal is developed and managed with BISAG-N, an Autonomous Scientific Society under MeitY headquartered in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, and hosted on MEGHRAJ cloud using GIS technology with ISRO imagery and Survey of India basemaps.
- PM GatiShakti National Master Plan was launched on 13 October 2021 and approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs on 21 October 2021 as a ₹100 lakh crore initiative driven by seven engines including Railways, Roads, Ports, Waterways, Airports, Mass Transport and Logistics Infrastructure.
- PulsePro data will be used for internal government use only to support data driven infrastructure planning, economic analysis and urban and rural development, complementing existing datasets and advancing the Viksit Bharat by 2047 vision.
