India is the world’s largest growing economy and is becoming a tech-enabled country at a rapid pace. The Prime Minister’s vision of a unified Digital India has led to several initiatives to utilize technology and transform the lives of every citizen.

In 2013, the Government of India launched the Project Monitoring Group (PMG), an organization aimed at removing bottlenecks and accelerating the pace of execution in significant infrastructure projects of national importance involving investments of ₹500 crores & above.

To maintain and mend the lack of coordination between Departments, leading to mismatched planning and execution, in 2021 Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced Gati Shakti, a national initiative for multi-modal connectivity through a digital platform that will bring 16 Indian Ministries together for integrated planning and coordination.

The aim of Gati Shakti is ‘One Data, One Entry’, ensuring that planning and designing are done in compliance with execution with a common goal in mind.

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) envisioned PMG and India Investment Grid (IIG) portal as the central data platform for all major infrastructure projects in India by integrating them together and with several other data applications that are being maintained by the Government of India. This was another initiative toward the unified Digital India movement.

ColoredCow and Gati Shakti

ColoredCow got on board as the technical partner for PMG, starting with the implementation of these integrations. We kicked off in April 2022, with a team of 10 involving a project manager, a solution architect, a team of UI/UX designers, frontend & backend developers, testers, and DevOps engineers. We took over the existing platform built on React frontend, Java’s SpringBoot backend, MySQL database, and AWS infrastructure.

The team had the following responsibilities:

1. Layout a plan and architecture of the first integration with the IIG platform, which holds the data for all investment projects. Without the integration, the Government of India was maintaining multiple duplicate projects within these systems.
2. Work on the existing bugs and open issues that daily users are facing
3. Enhance the user experience by optimizing existing workflows and introducing new features.

Integrating the PMG and IIG Portal

(Flow for projects drafts from IIG imported to PMG)

The key requirements that were expected:

1. A channel to be established for data exchange between the IIG portal & PMG portal
2. The channel must be secure as the data being exchanged is highly sensitive
3. Once the data is transferred to the PMG portal, build new user interfaces to display that data

Based on the above requirements, the team worked on the following:

1. Setting up SSO (Single Sign On) for all ministries and promoters to enable seamless access through the portal. Logging into one platform automatically gives you access to the other platform, making transitioning easy.
2. Set up REST APIs for secure data exchange between the two portals. The PMG portal provided several APIs to the IIG portal for easy data exchange.
3. The APIs were divided into three parts:
   1. The first set of APIs was to authenticate the connection via a set of secret credentials
   2. The second set of APIs was added to create new projects in the PMG portal whenever a new project is created on the IIG portal
   3. The third set of APIs was responsible for updating existing projects so that the data sets are always in sync between the two projects, hence unifying the data
4. A data transformation module was built that modifies the data during the exchange as the information architecture and data schema in the two platforms were different. This module maps several fields between the two portals to ensure there is no discrepancy in the data.
5. Creating easy-to-navigate and use websites by incorporating clean UI/UX upgrades
6. Establishing common data lakes between the two portals to make analytics more efficient and effortless

“Working with ColoredCow was a great experience. They understood our requirements well and addressed them proficiently, especially the way they managed all tasks with accountability and transparency. The ColoredCow team actively engaged with the other teams to seamlessly transition us into a unified platform.It was a pleasure to work with such a well-coordinated and forthcoming team”

Rohit Dua, Sr. Manager, Invest India

Key Challenges

There were several challenges that the team faced while working on the PMG-IIG integration.

1. While working with external teams, like IIG’s development team that maintains IIG’s portal, the team had to ensure.
   a. Timings and schedules for IIG’s tech team and ColoredCow were in sync with the requirements and roadmap
   b. Consistent communication and confirmation of commitments from both teams were maintained
   c. Minimizing codependency on work to avoid multiple delays in deliveries
2. Data transformation module
   a. Proper planning had to be done to map the data between the two platforms. Several key pieces of information were missing from the source data that were needed and organization of data was required to avoid data discrepancies and data loss.
3. Task breakdown
   a. The estimated duration for the platform integration was around 6 months. The team had to divide the work into smaller milestones for course corrections and early feedback.

Outcomes

We worked closely with the Invest India, PMG, and IIG teams, and successfully executed design-level updates, technical architecture, implementation, project management, and QA for PMG.

Data:

1. We migrated data for over 3K active users from various government bodies
2. Users retained their account credentials within the new system without experiencing any downtime and accessibility issues
3. More than 2K national-level projects worth ₹60 lakh crores were also linked

We are grateful to have been part of a pivotal and significant step toward a Unified Digital India.

“Being able to contribute to this integration was an exciting and fulfilling experience. I witnessed the impact of my work first-hand and was able to effortlessly collaborate with my teammates to build a successful platform without setbacks.”

Shailesh Kala, Software Engineer at ColoredCow