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HomeNewsOpinionNational Logistics Policy | NLP can do to India’s logistics what UPI has done to payments

National Logistics Policy | NLP can do to India’s logistics what UPI has done to payments

The pivot idea of the National Logistics Policy will be the seamless interoperability, through an overarching interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, and multi-jurisdictional architecture backed by a robust tech backbone

September 19, 2022 / 07:16 IST
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Long queues of lorries and trucks loaded with cargo at the inter-state border gates of national highways is a familiar sight. It is not always because of the tolls that they have to pay to continue with their journey. A large part of this is also because of documentation, and cumbersome procedural bottlenecks.

In India getting goods to move from the source point to the destination has always been a seriously costly affair. While, there is no official estimation of logistics cost for India, some estimates have pegged logistics cost to be 13 to 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). This compares unfavourably with European countries where the logistics costs stand at about 8-9 percent of the GDP.

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From jurisdictional issues to non-standardised paperwork, to ambiguous state levies to byzantine procedures, to a multitude of IT-backbones, a barrage of hurdles have added on India’s logistics costs that have come in the way of turning India into an efficient, single market.

These costs have had three major implications. One, it adds to inflation. Greater costs of transporting goods creep their way into the final prices of goods, knocking up inflation along the way.