Logistics industry has the potential to add to GDP substantially by making India a more competitive place by reducing cost and enhancing speed of delivery. Industry experts talk about ways to make the industry cost-effective and the roadmap to recovery from the pandemic’s impact on logistics industry in a recent webinar held by the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport.
Kalpana Lohumi
Suresh Prabhu, Former Minister of Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation, Government of India
The biggest hurdle the Indian business faces, among other barriers, is logistics. We must distinguish between logistics and infrastructure. Infrastructure is a basic necessity for logistics but just by creating infrastructure one cannot address the problem of logistics. Despite investing enough into infrastructure in the last decade or two, the logistics problem has not been solved. We need to focus on integration in the logistics industry. We have invested huge amount of money in last few years into development of roads, but can one confidently say that it has necessarily resulted into better logistics? Therefore while we need roads, railways, ports and air connectivity, we also need to ensure all the modes need to work in tandem and they produce the desired results. Logistics is little more than infrastructure.
Logisticians were the real warriors of this crisis
No industry can grow without logistics. One of the most underrated industries in COVID-19 pandemic is logistics. Everyone has talked about doctors and health workers as warriors but what about logisticians? Despite being the ones who made medical supplies available and ensured that farmers’ produce does not go waste in this crisis; the industry didn’t get the recognition.
N Sivasailam, Former Special Secretary (Logistics), Ministry of Commerce & Industry
In my view, regionalisation means India’s self-reliance along with the globe. This initiative would create facilitative environment in order to ensure a good reign of business. It may cover not only the movement of petroleum and other essential goods but also a whole lot of India’s exports in container trade. We are not trying to say that vessels should be of Indian investment or there should not be any foreign investment. However, this is also a means of attracting foreign domestic investment in India and making India an attractive place for FDI for the service sector.
As far as air cargo is concerned, large number of cargo is waiting to be exported from India. One way to go forward at the operational level is to develop Air Freight Stations (AFSs) which has happened in Delhi and Chennai. I would strongly advise the air cargo fraternity to take a lead.
Deepak Garg, Founder, Rivigo
During the COVID times, we have realised that truck drivers wanted to become relay drivers more than the long-haul drivers. Relay trucking has become an option for our truck drivers, and this has become possible in these times only because we were using technology meaningfully much before. We have deployed lot of censors and converted every truck into IoT device.
Staying safe with technology
We are using technology to connect with our workforce and to interact with them more seamlessly. Every truck driver, in our case, is on pilot app and everything can be done right from the duty allocation to change-over process, health insurance etc. Everyone in the last three years has been covered in the app and during this time we were able to connect with them much more meaningfully.
We give this data to our customers as well. I would also like to say COVID-19 is an opportunity for the logistics sector. We have been saying that we spent 14 per cent of our GDP in logistics and we should get it down to 7-8 per cent. But if you look at the data of US and Europe or any other developed country, they were able to do it only on the back of technology. IT spend in US is 50 per cent of total logistics spend.
