Integrated Transport & Logistics Policy to Reduce Costs & Congestion
Government of India is formulating an Integrated Transport and Logistics Policy aimed at transforming India’s logistics from a point-to-point model to a hub-and-spoke model to achieve reduction in logistics costs by nearly half and reduce congestion on the highways. Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport Highways & Shipping, speaking at a curtain-raiser event of India Integrated Transport & Logistics Summit (IITLS), recently stated that country will initially have 50 economic corridors that have already been identified. Most of these corridors are national highway expansion plans, where two-lane highways will be expanded to six-lanes; and by upgrading key feeder and inter-corridor routes overall efficiency of freight will be improved. The move would increase the average distances covered by the freight vehicles from the existing 200-250 km to 350 km. India also plans to develop 35 multi-modal logistics parks to serve as centers for freight aggregation and distribution, multi-modal transportation, storage and warehousing. In addition, there are also plans to construct 10 Inter-Modal Stations that will integrate various transportation modes like rail, road, mass rapid transit system, bus rapid transit, auto-rickshaw, taxi and private vehicles.
India Integrated Transport & Logistics Summit (IITLS) 2017, to be held from 3rd to 5th May, 2017 in New Delhi, is an excellent platform to understand various opportunities available in different segments of transport & logistics sector in India. India provides lots of opportunities of growth in this sector, as besides having huge requirement of Transport & Logistics services due to its sheer size in terms of population and geography, it also is a growing economy; and its existing infrastructure is bound to be maintained, upgraded and expanded. Sector has already witnessed a huge upward increase in spending as the present Government has committed itself to improve the infrastructure. Modi government has rolled out a large number of new projects and has also cleared the past projects that were stuck in some or the other bottleneck. There were Rs. 3.85 lakh crore of stalled projects when this government came to power and at present 95% of these projects are operational.
The future of urban transportation technologies will be an integral part of this integrated transport and logistics policy where new technologies such as Metrino and Hyperloop will be introduced to decongest roads:
Metrino is a public transport ropeway like system that runs on electricity and driverless pods and comes down at designated stations thus removing the traffic burden from already congested roads and will initially connect the 70-km stretch from Dhaula Kuan in Delhi to Manesar in Haryana to decongest the national capital region and ease traffic. The capital cost of Metrino is Rs. 50 crore per km against Rs. 250 crore per km of the Metro.
Hyperloop is the futuristic tube-based high-speed passenger and freight transportation system that would propel a pod-like vehicle through a near-vacuum tube at more than airline speed, could potentially see distances like Delhi-Mumbai (1200 kilometers) being covered in less than one hour. Among the proposed routes and their feasibility, Hyperloop is potentially looking at five Indian sectors where the system can be built: Delhi-Mumbai, Bangalore-Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai-Bangalore, Mumbai-Chennai and a port connector project.
Metrino
Hyperloop