Optimising Transportation Networks for Faster Deliveries

There’s a scene that plays out every night somewhere on the outskirts of an Indian city.

A truck idles at a state border. The driver has his paperwork, his thermos of chai, and the particular kind of patience that comes from doing this a hundred times before.

In the back of the truck, something is losing time it doesn’t have. Fruit on the edge of its shelf life. Medicine with a temperature window that won’t wait for bureaucracy. A consignment that left the warehouse late and is falling further behind with every passing minute. It all waits, quietly, while paperwork decides its fate.

By morning, the driver has cleared the checkpoint and the goods are moving again. But somewhere in those lost hours, a crate of mangoes has crossed a threshold it cannot come back from. A vaccine shipment has stretched the limits of its cold window. A retailer’s shelf will open understocked.

The delay has already cost someone, somewhere, something they cannot put on an invoice.

This is the quiet tax that inefficient transportation networks have levied on India for decades. And for a country as large and as hungry for growth as this one, the bill has been enormous.

But that story is being rewritten. Quietly, steadily, and largely on the back of retail supply chain solutions that didn’t exist a decade ago.

A] The Price of Moving Slowly

For years, India’s logistics costs sat at around 13 to 14 percent of the country’s GDP. Nearly double the global benchmark of 8 percent. That gap shows up in the shrinking margins of a food brand trying to expand nationally and in the frustration of a farmer watching his produce lose value with every hour of delay.

The reasons are structural and stubborn. Roads carry 60 to 70 percent of all freight, but Indian trucks were averaging just 300 kilometres a day against a global standard of 500 to 800.
Rail was gridlocked by the sharing of tracks between passenger trains and freight, which meant goods moved at the pace of a schedule built for people, not cargo. Multimodal thinking, the idea of moving goods seamlessly across road, rail, and water, existed mostly on paper.

Then something shifted, deliberately, and by design.

• GST dismantled the state-by-state tax barriers that had made every border crossing a negotiation.
• Dedicated freight corridors began separating goods movement from passenger rail for the first time.
• PM Gati Shakti brought roads, ports, and warehousing into a single planning framework.
• The National Logistics Policy set a clear national target: bring logistics costs down to global benchmarks.

These were not incremental adjustments but a fundamental rewiring of the system.

A DPIIT-commissioned study by NCAER (National Council of Applied Economic Research) places India’s logistics cost for FY 2023-24 at 7.97 percent of GDP.

Not 13. Not 14.

The reform has been real, and it has left a number on the page to prove it, unlocking the potential for faster delivery in supply chain operations.

B] The Train That Changed the Equation

If you want to understand what it looks like when a transportation network actually gets optimised, look at what happened when India built a train that carried no passengers at all.

The Eastern and Western Dedicated Freight Corridors, 2,843 kilometres of track built exclusively for goods, have done something that policy documents rarely achieve. They have genuinely rewritten what transit time means in this country.

Container trains that once took multiple days crawling from the National Capital Region to Mumbai now complete that journey in 24 to 36 hours. Coal moving from eastern mines to northern power plants, which used to take 35 hours, now arrives in 20 hours. The Western DFC has cut transit times from port to the NCR by more than half.

From an average of 247 freight trains a day in 2023-24, the corridors now handle over 403 daily. A single kilometre-long freight train on the Eastern DFC is estimated to replace approximately 72 trucks on the highway.

This is not just marginal improvement. It is a different way of thinking about movement entirely, a massive leap forward for transportation network optimisation.

C] The Logic of the Right Route

Speed alone has never been the full answer. The fastest route is rarely the most obvious one.

Think about a consignment of temperature-sensitive goods leaving Chennai for Delhi. It does not just need a truck. It needs a system. Rail for the long haul, where volume and economics align. Road for the first and last mile, where flexibility is everything. Cold storage hubs that are placed along the route so that dwell time does not become spoilage time.

This is multimodal logistics, and it is increasingly what serious, large-scale logistics network optimisation is built on.

India’s PM Gati Shakti initiative has made this kind of thinking into structural policy, weaving together roads, rail, ports, and inland waterways into a single planning framework.

Bharatmala is adding highway capacity at scale. Inland waterways, long left idle, are returning as a cost-effective option for bulk freight. The country is, slowly and then very quickly, becoming a more navigable place to move things across.

The infrastructure is laying the foundation. Technology is what keeps the promise.

D] When the Cargo Talks Back

There is a moment in every well-run logistics operation when the shipment is no longer just cargo. It becomes a data point.

IoT sensors track temperature in real time. GPS narrows arrival windows from vague half-day estimates to hour-by-hour precision. Telematics flags a vehicle running hot before it becomes a breakdown on a highway. Predictive analytics read historical traffic, weather patterns, and vehicle behaviour to re-route a consignment before the disruption even reaches the driver.

For temperature-sensitive goods, this is not a feature. That is the entire point. A vaccine that travels from Mumbai to a rural clinic in Rajasthan is only as good as the cold chain it rode in on. A degree of variance, sustained over a few hours, does not just affect quality. It affects lives.

The technology has matured to the point where a logistics operator who is not using it is not just inefficient. They are operating with a blindfold on, ignoring the basic tenets of transportation management in logistics.

E] 13 Lakh Units and What That Number Actually Means

This is the landscape ColdStar operates in and builds for.

At ColdStar, we handle over 13 lakh units of temperature-sensitive cargo. Each one of those units has a destination, a temperature requirement, a compliance standard, and someone at the other end waiting for it.

Our facilities are built to meet GDP, Good Distribution Practice, standards. Not as a credential on a wall, but as a discipline that plays out in daily, gritty operations across every kind of Indian geography, whether that’s coastal humidity, mountain cold or plains heat. The particular chaos of a monsoon that does not check the delivery schedule before it arrives.

What this demands is a network that is not just fast but consistent. Speed without reliability is a gamble. A supply chain that performs brilliantly 90 percent of the time and fails quietly the other 10 is not a fast supply chain. It is an unreliable one with occasionally impressive numbers. Optimising a network means building for the full hundred, not celebrating the ninety.

F] The Last Kilometre

Everything above, the freight corridors, the multimodal thinking, the sensors and algorithms, eventually converges on a single moment. The last kilometre.

This is where everything either holds or comes apart. In India, that last kilometre can be a congested urban lane, a village road that turns into a river during rains, or a cold storage hub sitting 40 kilometres from the nearest clinic. The variables are not hypothetical. They are daily.

This is why a network worth building is not designed from the highway inward. It is designed from the delivery point outward. What does the customer need? In what condition? By when? And then, working backwards, what vehicle, what route, what contingency must exist to make that promise land?

A cold storage hub that exists on a map but cannot be reached in time is a liability, not a logistics asset. The design of the last kilometre has to account for that distance, that road condition, and that temperature window before the consignment ever leaves the origin point.

The principle has not changed. Only the scale and the stakes have.

G] The Road Ahead

India aims to significantly increase freight volumes, with rail freight alone targeted to reach around 3 billion tonnes annually by 2030. That is not just a logistics number. It is a measure of how much the country expects to grow, consume, and connect within this decade.

At ColdStar, we watch that number with the attention it deserves. Because for us, optimising transportation networks is not an abstract exercise. It is the difference between a vaccine that arrives in perfect condition and one that does not. Between a supply chain that holds under pressure and one that breaks quietly and expensively.

The corridors are built, the technology is embedded, and for the first time, the policy intent has translated into numbers that actually hold up.

What India needs now is not more infrastructure announcements. It needs operators who can work the network consistently, at scale, and with the discipline that temperature-sensitive cargo demands.

That is the standard we hold ourselves to. And it is work that is never finished.