Rivers, Ropes and Railbeds: Inside India's High-Stakes Gamble to Rewire Its Logistics Map

Not theoretically, not as a policy promise, but as a lived reality across roads clogged with trucks, ports burdened with queues, railway sidings that connect to nowhere, and rivers that have returned to relevance after a century of neglect. India's new transport story does not begin with a shiny highway or a fresh Vande Bharat train. It begins with a question the country has ignored for decades: How does cargo actually move?

- BY RAJAT MISHRA

This is the heart of India's multimodal revolution, a quiet but disruptive attempt to stitch together a logistics ecosystem that has evolved in fragments. The idea is elegant in theory, seamless cargo movement across waterways, railways, roadways, ropeways and air cargo nodes, all under a unified planning architecture called PM Gati Shakti.

“There’s no doubt positive steps have been taken. But true multimodality needs roads, railways, and shipping to talk to each other. Right now, each operates in its own silo. Gati Shakti is a good start—but it’s still more of an infrastructure map than an operational framework for real modal shift,” said Nitin Chandra, Director - Head, Logistics Advisory, CBRE South Asia Pvt Ltd.

But the reality on the ground is far more complicated.

A senior logistics expert who advises multiple government departments but prefers to remain anonymous, says it bluntly: “India’s multimodal drive has political ambition, but not operational rigour. Every mode still works in its own silo. There is no institutional mechanism that measures whether a piece of cargo actually moves seamlessly.”

Behind the scenes, the past five years have seen an unprecedented attempt to break those silos. No one has been closer to this shift than Prakash Gaur, former CEO of the National Highways Logistics Management Company Ltd (NHLML) and a key architect of India’s multimodal planning layer.

“People forget what actually changed,” Gaur says. “Before Gati Shakti, ministries planned alone—Railways planned stations, Highways built roads, Shipping developed ports. Today 69 ministries and states sit on one digital planning platform. For the first time in India’s history, a project above ₹500 crore must prove integrated connectivity before it gets approved. That discipline didn’t exist ten years ago.”

This is the promise. But the friction lies in the gap between planning and execution.