India is set to become a destination for cheaper exports and imports, and to boost India's cost-effectiveness, the government would formulate a new logistics vision soon, Suresh Prabhu, minister of commerce & industries and civil aviation, said on Tuesday.
“We will have an integrated logistics plan document. In fact, the draft is ready and soon people will log on to a logistics portal, where many issues will be properly addressed,” said Prabhu, after attending a workshop on National Integrated Logistics Plan, organised by the department of commerce.
Prabhu said that the logistics plan will be implemented as soon as possible to help improve India's image of having high cost and inefficient logistics set up. “We are working on it and I am sure that once it is done India's major challenge of high cost of logistics and very low efficiency in logistics despite having so many ministries dealing with it, will be addressed,” he added.
Earlier, while addressing the workshop, comprising of think tank experts, logistics industry representatives and ministry officials, Prabhu had set the focus on integrating the use of IT technology in the logistics sector.
“Technology is fast influencing the logistics landscape, enabling aggregation of transport and storage assets,” Prabhu said in his address. “Logistics sector is on a growth tide and is the backbone of the economy.”
The government had already formulated an agri-export plan integrating a number of ministries along with Prabhu's commerce and civil aviation ministries. “Improved and an efficient logistics system can reduce wastage in agriculture and can also create abundant jobs,” the Union minister said.
Later talking to reporters, Prabhu explained that the integrated logistics action plan would involve the largest number of ministries. State governments, too, would have their own roles to play. He said that India is now looking towards innovative supply chain management solutions driving progress.
But Prabhu's idea is to not stop at just having an inter-ministerial coordination. “In this plan, we would also be involving every other aspect of logistics, be it legislative, administrative, technology, financial and all other aspects related to logistics,” said Prabhu.
In the recent past, improvements in India’s ports sector had ramped up India’s rankings in the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) index of the World Bank. India had ramped up port capacity and also allowed changes in its shipping rules to allow foreign shipping operators to get business from Indian ports. Shipping traffic to India has improved significantly after the changes were implemented.
In the civil aviation space, the government has engaged in starting 233 small airports in non-metro locations under its UDAN scheme. The ministry of road transport and highways under Nitin Gadkari has claimed that India is the fastest highway developer in the world with 27 km of highways being built every day.
Under Gadkari, India is also developing container transhipment through inland waterways connecting inland cities. Prabhu said that all these efforts would culminate into the Integrated Logistics Plan and provide future roadmaps for all of them.
