MUMBAI:
Around 70% of India’s container volume is set to come under online tracking on a single window system following a landmark agreement to extend the pioneering Logistics Data Bank (LDB) service, now operational at Mumbai’s JNPT ports, to the Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) Container Terminals in Gujarat’s Mundra and Hazira.
The LDB, which is operated by the DMICDC Logistics Data Services Limited (DLDS), uses RFID technology
to track EXIM Containers along the western corridor of India, starting from the ports and covering their entire movement through rail or road until the Inland Container Depots (ICDs) and Container Freight Stations (CFSs).
Under the agreement signed on Tuesday between DLDS and APSEZ, the tracking service will be introduced at the Container Terminals in Mundra and Hazira on May 1, 2017. This will effectively bring 70% of the country’s container volume— amounting to 8.4 million TEUs out of the pan-India annual container traffic of 12 million TEUs— on the LDB tracking system. JNPT, India’s largest port, accounts for 4.5 million TEUs, and with Mundra and Hazira container terminals another 3.9 million TEUs will be added.
The move will not only help shippers and end users track the whereabouts of their cargo in near-real time and through a dedicated single window from any device, but will help logistics entities to streamline their operations.
India’s logistics sector faces multiple bottlenecks due to its unorganized nature, and difficulties in gauging the root causes of these bottlenecks. The LDB will help analyze the enormous amount of data generated, deploy intelligence on it and help the stakeholders come up with viable solutions for the problems.
LDB service and the strong analytics and insights generated through it, will have a significant impact on shortening shipping lead times, reducing inventory levels, transaction costs incurred by the shippers and consignees, and improving the accuracy of production plans across the entire sector.
“The trust shown by APSEZ in the LDB services is a testimony of the success of the project that started from JNPT in July 2016,” said Alkesh Sharma, CEO& MD, DMICDC. “With the re
cent ranking of World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index 2016 in which India has jumped 19 places to the 35th rank, DMICDC’s Logistics Data Bank project is a major step in further improving the logistics supply chain in the country. Logistics Data Bank intends to bring a drastic change in the way container movement is tracked and its visibility across the supply chain.”
LDB has been designed to be a large scalable project and the DLDS aims to expand it to other container handling ports in the western corridor as well as the southern corridor in the near future, for a pan-India reach and maximizing the effectiveness of the project.
