Cabinet sets a 500-crore technical gate under a new transport authority

The Union Cabinet on Tuesday approved an Integrated Transport and Logistics Authority that will write a national transport master plan of at least ten years and technically appraise government projects costing 500 crore rupees or more. Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced the decision in New Delhi. Financial appraisal of those projects stays where it is. The new body takes the technical look.

ITLA will sit with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade in the commerce ministry. Its plan is meant to cover roads, railways, ports and shipping, civil aviation, inland waterways, coastal shipping, urban mobility and logistics in one document. It will also test five-year sectoral plans and the annual plans of the transport ministries against that longer document. Vaishnaw said master plans of 10, 12 and 30 years would be prepared.

The threshold is the part with an immediate effect on files. A new railway line, a doubling, or a highway project at or above 500 crore rupees will have its technical appraisal done under this body, "keeping in mind the future requirements," Vaishnaw said. Monitoring of projects above that line, and post-completion impact checks, also sit with ITLA. He put the question in plain terms: if a highway has been built, what benefit did it give; if a line has been doubled, what benefit did it give; if a port has been built, what benefit did it give.

The data piece is a National Transport Data Repository. Vaishnaw said GST data, FASTag data, railway data and other sets had to be taken together so that planning became data-based. The Hindustan Times account of the decision lists GSTN e-way bills, FASTag, Vahan, GPS-based systems and urban traffic systems as inputs for freight-flow and origin-destination work. This sits next to PM GatiShakti, launched in 2021, which by June 2026 had more than 3,202 data layers across 58 ministries and departments, and next to the National Logistics Policy of 2022. ITLA is not a replacement for either. It is a body that can tell a ministry its project does not fit the longer plan.

Vaishnaw's growth line is the justification he offered for the merger of planning. "The requirement of logistics is increasing. Practically, if GDP grows by 7 percent, the logistics requirement grows by 10 percent." He also said that planning now had to look at the requirement ten years out for roads, airports and seaports together, rather than ministry by ministry. Moneycontrol reported a related Cabinet approval the same day: a 10,000 crore rupee SME Growth Fund, announced in the 2026-27 Budget, under the "Creating Champion MSMEs" heading. That fund is a separate decision. It was announced in the same briefing.

What the authority does not do is spend. Financial appraisal continues through existing mechanisms. ITLA appraises, monitors, and asks whether a finished project did what it was supposed to do. It can also help review the National Logistics Policy, run capacity building, and back research. The power that will be felt first is the 500 crore rupee technical gate. A project that cannot show how it sits inside a ten-year multi-modal plan will have a harder file.

The open question is membership and veto. Vaishnaw described all the major infrastructure ministries coming together as one planning group. He did not, in the briefing reported on Tuesday, say whether ITLA can stop a project or only comment on it. Until that rule is published, the authority is a new reader of large transport files, not yet a new spender.

The logistics ratio he cited is a planning input, not a forecast the Cabinet adopted as a target. If output grows at 7 percent and freight demand at 10 percent, the gap compounds. A ten-year master plan is the document in which that gap is supposed to show up as missing port capacity, missing rail paths, or a highway that duplicates a line already being doubled. The repository is how ITLA would see the duplication. E-way bills show the goods. FASTag shows the highway trip. Railway data shows the competing path. None of those systems was built to veto a project. Wired together, they can at least flag one.

DPIIT is an unusual home for a body that will read railway and highway files. Those files have lived in their own ministries. Putting the technical gate in the commerce ministry's industry department is a choice about who convenes, not about who builds. The railways will still lay track. The roads ministry will still award highways. What changes on Tuesday's decision is who signs the technical note on a project above 500 crore rupees.