The center appears to be working on a National Master Plan for development of highways and expressways for 2047.
How Does This Help?
This plan holds a great significance as it will enable trucks to more than double the distance they cover in a day to 800 km, as informed by a senior official on Thursday.
The trucks in India cover 300-350 km in a day presently which is much less than the figures in the US and Europe.
In Europe, this limit is 750 km a day similarly, in the US the drivers can legally drive up to 1100-1200 km a day driving at the speed 100 km an hour.
Considering the development of expressways and newer highways, the increase in speed would help bring down logistics costs by 3-4%, stated the official on the condition of anonymity.
Reducing The Cost Of Logistics
Logistics costs in the country range between 7.8% to 8.9% of the total economic output, according to a recent study done by Assessment and Long-Term Framework by National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), in consultation with Asian Development Bank (ADB) and experts.
In order to make it more efficient, the government came out with a logistics policy in September.
With this policy, they aim to reduce the cost of logistics in India to be comparable to global benchmarks by 2030.
They want to improve the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index (LPI) ranking and be amongst the top 25 countries by 2030 and create a data driven decision support mechanism for an efficient logistics ecosystem.
During 2023, the World Bank has ranked India 38 out of 139 countries in its LPI rankings table.
This was an improvement of six places from the ranking of 2018 notably.
Besides this, the National Masterplan for the development of the National Highways/ Expressways network for 2047 will increase the overall framework of the National Highways in the country.
It appears that this master plan is part of the broader Vision 2047 which has been prepared by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.
Almost 50,000 km of access controlled highways are proposed to be constructed, under this plan.
Further, they will be aligning these expressways, in such a way that they will be just 100-125 km from any point in the country.
The total length of access controlled expressways in the country is 2913 kms as of date.
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