New Delhi: India suffers a huge loss of USD 21.3 billion annually on account of delays and additional fuel consumption due to poor road conditions and frequent halts, says a study.
" According to the estimates, the cost of delay was USD 6.6 billion per year and the cost of additional fuel consumption due to delay was USD 14.7 billion per year," the study conducted jointly by logistics firm Transport Corporation of India (TCI) and IIM-Kolkata said.
"In India, the scope of multi-modal transportation remained limited, given that most of the freight was carried by roads and the rest by railways," the study said. The report, which was released by Road, Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari today, is based on joint survey of road freight transportation along 28 key routes in the country.
"The share of waterways and airways in carrying domestic freight was almost insignificant. Road transportation was door-to-door, reliable and efficient, with vehicles available almost in real-time. Railways, on the other hand, suffered from inefficiency, poor service, loading delays and the unavailability of rakes," the study said.
It said freight rate increased more than freight cost in the last three years with an increase in the contribution margin over the 2011-12 level on Delhi-Bangalore and Delhi-Mumbai routes.
Among the remaining 26 routes, one common observation was that for routes covering the eastern and north-eastern parts of the country, average vehicle speeds were lower and average stoppage delays were higher than the corresponding national ’averages due to poor road conditions, more stops, long queues, delays at border check posts and on-road police intervention.
"If the average statistics for the 28 major routes surveyed approximately represent the national average, it may be inferred that while average stoppage delays per km have remained almost the same as in 2011-12, average stoppage expenses per tonne-km worsened during the same period.
The average contribution margin improved in 2014-15," the study said. The government should simplify and standardise the rules and regulations across different transportation modes to facilitate multi-modal transportation, it recommended.
Also it stressed that the government should remove all infrastructural bottlenecks to boost the movement of domestic freight by inland waterways. "Despite India possessing a vast coastline and a significant inland waterways length, the share of waterways in carrying India’s domestic freight is insignificant.
Like railways, waterways are also an environment-friendly mode of transportation; sincere effort should be made to increase the share of inland waterways in domestic freight movement," the report recommended.
