A Greener Route for Freight Transport

Amid growing awareness about the need for adopting sustainable practices, freight transportation has majorly drawn global attention as they account for a substantial share of traffic and pollution in urban and metropolitan areas. Measures are therefore being explored to mitigate the negative effects of freight transportation.

- Shreya Bhattacharya

Economic activity in any country depends on the effectiveness of its logistics system and transportation is its essential and major sub-function that creates time and place utility in goods. Therefore, modernising the transportation infrastructure along with bringing trade friendly policies becomes quintessential.

In India, the transportation sector is still dominated by the road segment. India has the second largest road network in the world with a road length of 4,320,000 kilometre. Though extensive, but the network is still inadequate and suffers from a number of deficiencies like inability to handle high traffic density, poor conditions of roads etc. Also, greenhouse gas emissions and congestion continues to be the most serious environmental and sustainability issues relating to freight transport and logistics here. The average productivity of a truck in India is 200 kilometre a day which could be increased to 350-400 kilometre just by reducing congestion.

Roads here account for more than 60 percent of the total freight traffic consisting of 2.2 million heavy duty trucks and 0.6 million light duty trucks carrying more than 3000 million metric ton of load annually. According to industry experts, the road freight movement is expected to increase at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 15 percent. This is in wake of the growth in Indian FMCG, retail and pharmaceutical sectors, which have large freight transport requirements across the country and are generally done by road transportation.

To handle this ever growing pressure, massive highway development projects have been undertaken under the National Highways Development Project (NHDP) of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) over the last decade.