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The Minister of Road Transport, Highways and Shipping, Mr Nitin Gadkari, has said that the government is working towards formulating an integrated, multimodal logistics and transport policy that will reduce logistics costs in the country by nearly half, making Indian products more competitive. The strategy would be to adopt a “hub-and-spoke” model for the logistics sector in place of the present “point-to-point” model.
Mr Gadkari further said that the integrated policy would include construction of 50 economic corridors and upgrading key feeder and inter-corridor routes to improve overall efficiency of freight movement. The plan also includes developing 35 multimodal logistics parks to serve as centres for freight aggregation and distribution, multimodal transportation, storage and warehousing and value-added services. In addition, there are also plans to construct 10 inter-modal stations which integrate various transportation modes like rail, road, mass rapid transit system, bus rapid transit, autorickshaw, taxi and private vehicles.
An overall network of about 56,000 km has been identified, including existing national corridors (Golden Quadrilateral and NS-EW Corridor), proposed economic corridors, inter-corridor routes and feeder routes. In addition to this, 191 towns/cities have been identified on these routes where steps will be taken to reduce congestion. Inter-state border movement-related documentation and procedure will also be simplified. These interventions will enable a reduction of 5-6 per cent in the overall supply chain costs in the economy. Logistics parks will help reduce transportation cost for the top 15 nodes by about 10 per cent, besides reducing pollution, congestion and warehousing costs. Chennai and Vijayawada have already identified land parcels for development of logistics parks. Pre-feasibility study will be initiated in these two cities on immediate basis.
This is the first time ever that the development of the transport sector is being done in such an integrated manner. The plan would serve to make the economy competitive by reducing logistics costs, bring down pollution levels by reducing congestion on roads, give a boost to industry and create employment.
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