TOWARDS AFFORDABLE LOGISTICS

The NLP provides a much-needed fillip to the 150-billiondollar logistics industry

- By JAGANNARAYAN PADMANABHAN,

THE NATIONAL LOGISTICS POLICY (NLP), launched on September 17, 2022, provides a much-needed fillip to the 150-billion logistics industry. The policy aims to bridge the gap between the logistics cost of India 14 per cent of cost of goods sold) and those of developed markets 8-10 per cent).

The NLP envisages world-class infrastructure, modern warehousing, digitalisation, regulations, tracing and tracking, ease of arranging shipment, and timeliness.

The policy’s four critical features are integration of the digital system, a Unified Logistics Interface Platform, Ease of the Logistics Services, and a system improvement group.

The logistics business, by its very nature, is quite fragmented and has multiple stakeholders e.g. shipper, transporter road, rail, sea), customs, freight forwarders, warehouse provider, etc. and hence there was a need to standardise and align these processes and provide a single view to all the stakeholders. There was also a need to benchmark and standardise the infrastructure and services across all the touch points the new logistics policy at its core aims to provide this uniform look and feel to all stakeholders concerned. The visible benefit would be in faster decision-making, lower cost of servicing, efficient deployment of resources and reduction in time to market with a lot more transparency inbuilt into the system.

Challenges