The Minister of Road Transport and Highways Shri Nitin Gadkari reviewed the progress of the work to set up multi modal logistics parks in various parts of the country. In a meeting attended by senior officials of the Highways and Shipping Ministries, state governments, land port authorities, NHAI, NHIDCL, CONCOR, DFCCIL and DMIC, among others in New Delhi today, Shri Gadkari took stock of the status of 34 MoUs amounting to about Rs 2 lakh crores, that were signed in the three day India Integrated Transport and Logistics Summit held from the 3rd to 5th of May, this year. It may be recalled that the India Integrated Transport and Logistics Summit was a forum where stakeholders like the central and state governments, infrastructure developers in the private sector and global experts had got together to discuss and formulate a roadmap for developing an integrated, multi modal logistics and transport system in the country.
The objective was to make freight transportation in the country more efficient by facilitating the use of a favourable modal mix of transport, thereby reducing logistics costs and also pollution. This is proposed to be done by developing 35 multimodal logistics parks to serve as centres for freight aggregation and distribution, multimodal transportation, storage, warehousing and value added services, besides construction of 50 Economic Corridors, upgrading key feeder and inter corridor routes and constructing 10 inter-modal stations to integrate various transportation modes. In today’s review meeting the Minister directed that a lead agency should be identified for each of the 34 projects, to act as its head . A time schedule should be drawn up for completion of the project and implementation should be done in a time bound manner. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways will be the apex monitoring authority. He also said that the location of multi modal logistics parks should be selected outside the city limits, and care should be taken that it does not in any way create any inconvenience to the general public. This, he said, would not only decongest the cities but also bring down pollution.
Shri Gadkari also suggested that efforts should be made to persuade big godowns of various agencies which are currently situated inside cities to shift to the logistics parks. If this is done larger trucks can have access to the godowns than is possible within congested city limits. This will help curb pollution to a considerable extent. The Minister further directed that the project should focus on facilitating a favourable modal mix of transport. Inland waterways may be used if possible. Otherwise railways should be the preferred mode of transport since it is more cost effective and less polluting that road transport. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has also formulated a draft policy for development of multi modal logistics parks. It was decided to place this on the Ministry’s website to seek comments from stakeholders. Of the 34 MoUs signed during the India Integrated Transport and Logistics Summit, 27 were G2G and the remaining in the private sector. Today’s meeting was to review the progress of the G2G MoUs. 13 of these pertained to development of multi-modal logistics parks in the states of Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Mizoram, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Haryana. The remaining MoUs were regarding developing land ports and integrated check posts in Tripura, Assam, Mizoram, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Manipur; port road connectivity in Chennai and Vishakhapatnam ports besides 21 small ports of Sagarmala; use of dredged material for highway and other construction work and development of connectivity between Amramarg to the proposed Navi Mumbai airport.