Due to rapid industrialisation, large scale infrastructure development is taking place worldwide. This includes railways, high speed highways, elevated roads etc. To meet the demands of society and industry, many innovative techniques and materials are being developed. In developed nations like USA, Japan etc. for railways applications, new material like geocells, geogrids are being used successfully to enable fast movement of vehicles. The present research work was aimed to develop design methodologies for improvement of grounds subjected to cyclic loads caused by moving vehicles on roads, rail tracks etc. Deformation behavior of ballast under static and cyclic load tests was studied based on square footing test. The paper presents a study of the effect of geo-synthetic reinforcement on the (cumulative) plastic settlement, of point loaded square footing on a thick layer of granular base overlying different compressible bases. The research findings showed that inclusion of geo-synthetics significantly improves the performance of ballasted tracks and reduces the foundation area. If the area is kept same, higher speed trains can be allowed to pass through the same track with insertion of geosynthetics. Similarly, area of machine foundation may also be reduced where geosynthetics is provided in foundation. The model tests results have been validated by numerical modeling, using $FLAC^{3D}$.