India's Warehouse Boom

HOW INDIA STORES IS CHANGING; BIG MONEY SNIFFS FORTUNE

- Goutam Das

BEYOND POSTERS PROMISING ‘Total Repair’, ‘No Ammonia Glossy Hair Colour’, and ‘New Baby Lips’, are racks, and more racks.

Brown boxes, kept on blue pallets, occupy nine lines of yellow and red multi-tier racks in this 60,000 square feet (sq ft) block of steel, 13.5 meters high. There are two more blocks of similar size which aren’t operational just as yet, but already booked to capacity. As of now, the brown boxes store L’Oréal’s promise — shampoos, face washes, shades, creams. Soon, L’Oréal would share the floor with a kitchen storage brand.

This Mahindra Logistics Ltd. warehouse, a third party logistics provider, started two months ago and mimics modern factory best practices in many ways. There is a specific path to walk. Battery-operated material handling equipment vehicles, supplied by Godrej, move around on the rest of the floor at no more than 5 kilometres an hour. People who move these machines, scan the boxes and load or unload from trucks have to ensure they wear a bump cap, earplugs, gloves, steel toe shoes and long sleeve shirts that must be tucked into full length pants.

The warehouse is on Tauru Road, near Haryana’s industrial hub of Manesar. As you veer off from National Highway 48, towards Tauru, tea and juice shanties gradually give way to small fields and buildings with trucks parked. Further down, warehouses beeline on both sides of the road, a few under construction.

Across the road from Mahindra Logistics’ new warehouse is that of Ecom Express’ fulfillment centre, another “end-to-end” logistics solutions company but focused on the e-commerce industry. It is surrounded by agricultural land and the half a million sq ft warehouse is big enough for over 200 vehicles to come in and park inside its compound.