If you’re on any of India’s national highways, the sight of an overloaded truck travelling at a sedate pace is pretty common. Truckers seldom cover more than 300 km a day, compared to more than 1,000 km a day in the West, at speeds no more than 25 km an hour. Even today, a truck travelling from Delhi to Kolkata—a distance of about 1,500 km—has to cross five state border check-posts and ends up taking upwards of four days. For decades, these inefficiencies were taken for granted every time goods had to be moved from one place to another across the country.
(This story appears in the 13 April, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Thanks to NHAI's PPP model we see 4-6 lane good quality roads (i am not saying world class roads yet). However, we still lack proper traffic management and thats the reason trucks/goods vehicles hardly cover 300 KMs per day. Just to quote an example between Bengaluru-Pune National Highway, passenger service operators plying high speed vehicles like Volvo, Mercedes Benz etc still lose lot of time covering long distances who are often blocked/slowed by other slow moving vehicles due to lack of speed lane signages.
on Apr 5, 2012