Khajuraho Airport in Madhya Pradesh secured the joint top position in the Airports Authority of India’s customer satisfaction survey for January-June 2026, with a score of 4.98 out of 5. Incidentally, scheduled commercial flights from the airport stopped on July 1, before the survey results were out.
The development illustrates the mismatch between infrastructure provision and actual travel demand, with experts describing the practice of planning and building transport infrastructure as individualised, tokenised projects rather than parts of a larger plan on journeys people and goods make.
The Union Cabinet’s October 6 approval of the Integrated Transport and Logistics Authority (ITLA) has raised expectations among policy observers that India could move towards more coordinated planning of roads, railways, ports, aviation, waterways and urban mobility.
The authority is mandated to prepare a National Transport Master Plan with a horizon of at least 10 years, and will test ministries’ annual and shorter-term sectoral plans against it. It will also appraise central infrastructure projects costing ₹500 crore or more, monitor their implementation and assess their impact after completion. Whether it can deliver, experts say, will turn on the powers it is given.
A system of silos
A senior government official with experience across more than one transport-sector ministry at the Centre, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said departments often plan to expand their own networks without adequately accounting for investments being made by others. He said at different meetings within the government, the example of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has been cited, which was created following a merger in 2001.
“A railway line, highway or waterway may each be justified within its sector’s plans, but the connections between them can be overlooked. Everybody is trying to increase their own share from the same pie without looking at which is the most beneficial for the end user or the most resource-smart,” the official said.
The result, the official said, can be overlapping projects and infrastructure that does not connect properly with the wider network. “First- and last-mile links are a particular weakness. For example, a freight terminal or railway station may be built without adequate road connectivity to bring goods or passengers to it.”
Power, or the lack of it
Without powers to halt funding for individual projects, ITLA’s influence remains uncertain. Jagan Shah, professor of practice at IIT Delhi’s Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre, said the authority would need veto powers to make its broad mandate effective.
“Unless the authority has veto power — the mandate to review projects and, where necessary, veto them — it risks being unable to influence decisions,” Shah said, warning that a lack of powers, resources and independence could undermine both the public interest and the authority’s functioning.
Shah also raised questions about how ITLA would work with state and local agencies, particularly development authorities, whose responsibilities could overlap with its planning mandate.
He cited the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission as an example of an independent body that can publicly challenge the government on infrastructure decisions.
Only as good as its data
ITLA’s ability to compare projects will also depend on the quality of the information available to it. It is expected to build a National Transport Data Repository by bringing together data from Goods and Services Tax Network e-way bills, FASTag, VAHAN, global positioning systems and urban traffic management systems. The government says the repository will support freight-flow and origin-destination analysis for planning, monitoring and impact assessment.
Shah said the repository would need to be regularly updated and access to its data governed transparently. If information is incomplete or accessible only to selected users, he warned, it would create uncompetitive markets that would hurt economic growth in the medium and long term.
Pawan Mulukutla, executive programme director for integrated transport, clean air and hydrogen at WRI India, said the authority should include industry representatives and independent experts to ensure decisions reflect operational realities. “Different transport modes should complement rather than compete with one another, with choices guided by geography, the type of goods being moved, journey requirements, cost and efficiency.” He said all investment decisions must be tested against the economics of moving people and goods, with scope to use modelling and artificial intelligence-based tools to assess which transport modes would work best for particular routes and types of freight.
Capex vs service-oriented approach
The need for coordination has been recognised for years. Ravi Gadepalli, founder of Transit Intelligence, a public transport consultancy, said the idea of an integrated transport ministry has been around for a long time, “But it is difficult for institutions (different ministries) to give up independent decision-making powers.” Gadepalli hopes the ITLA can be a via-media solution where ministries retain their powers but coordinate on project specific matters. “The ILTA may go-beyond co-ordination and execute projects which are not within any individual ministry’s mandate such as building a multimodal hub connecting a railway station with a bus station, where separate agencies may have to build different components and secure permissions from one another.”
For passenger transport, that means looking beyond new roads and rail infrastructure to how people actually travel between and within cities. “Transport sector spending remains skewed towards building infrastructure rather than providing services. Highways are treated as development expenditure, while buses and railways are often expected to recover their costs through fares, even when affordable services require continuing public funding support,” he said.
To make the case for changing this approach, Gadepalli pointed to a 2020 policy brief by the International Association of Public Transport (UITP), which he co-authored. The study compared the employment and mobility benefits of different investments. For every ₹10,000 crore invested in 2016-17, improving public bus services was estimated to generate 110.4 million man-days of employment and provide access to 10.6 billion passenger-trips, against 3.2 million man-days and 2.8 billion passenger-trips for road infrastructure development. He said slowly the approach is changing with rollout of schemes such as PM-eBus Sewa but a larger and more systematic transition from road building to bus service improvement is needed at the national and state-levels.
Gadepalli said lack of multimodal transport planning could lead to investments that do not match actual travel demand. Citing Andhra Pradesh as an example, he said a new airport in Visakhapatnam was being followed by plans for airports in adjacent districts within 100km, even as some existing airports remained underused. He contrasted this with what he described as efforts in Europe to discourage short-haul flights in favour of rail travel and public transport.