Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

Logistics has been a healthy sector all along, it has constantly grown because mobility has become a necessity of life.

Logistics is an organized way of coordinating the movement of resources from one location to their intended destination, be it people, materials, inventory or equipment.

With more integrated economies of the world, easy creation of demand and unmatched Globalization, our supply chains too, need to be efficient and resilient.

But with the advent of climate change, carbon emission accounting has become extremely crucial for further abatement and human survival.

However, at the same time, transportation sector is one of the significant sources of environmental pollution: air, noise and increased transport infrastructure occupying the urban space.

In its own way, this sector turns out to be the first sector that emits maximum greenhouse gases and also the first and largest consumer of oil and oil products.

During the transportation through road networks, vehicles emit numerous carcinogenic and toxic pollutants like PM2.5, PM10, CO2, CH4, N2O, O3, halocarbons, SF3 etc.

Some of these, may even enter into the lungs and cause plethora of diseases.

While sifting through waters for global reach, these have notoriously caused oil spills, wreckage and even other ways polluting these vast but fragile ocean resources.

Transportation through any possible mode causes noise pollution, caused by the motoring units or tires on the road or the aerodynamic ones leading to the problems of communications, insomnia, and stress.

This extremely polluting but largely neglected sector is now being scrutinized for sustainability.

And in this light, Indian Government has introduced Secured Logistics Document Exchange (SLDE) and a Green House Gas Emission Calculator in this sector to strengthen the Digital India campaign.

How will SLDE help the sector?

In the press release, Minister for Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal exclaimed: “These digital initiatives have been launched to fill the gap in areas where no action has been taken either by private players or any of the line ministries.”

It aims to improve India’s ease of doing business (EODB 2020: India has been ranked 63 out of 190 countries), logistics efficiency, even reduce redundant costs, achieve multi-modality and thereafter promote sustainability.

The digital impetus involved will help digitize the currently manual process of generation, exchange and compliance of logistics, leading to a secure and seamless digital documents exchange system relevant to the sector.

This will be done using Aadhaar and blockchain-based security protocols to deliver data related to logistics on the digital platform.

Using these tools, Government seems to ensure and enhance data security and authentication, provide an absolute audit trail of document transfer, easy verification of the authenticity of documents.

All this will be done leading to faster execution of the transactions involved, reduced shipping costs and thereby reduce the overall lower carbon footprint of the sector.

Ministry notification states: “The proof of concept of the platform has been developed and executed with banks (ICICI, Axis Bank, State Bank of India and HDFC Bank) and stakeholders including freight forwarders, exporters, importers and vessel operators.”

The proof of concept deals with managing the risk involved and establishing the feasibility of the new idea or platform.

GHG emission calculator:

The Government has also rolled out this user-friendly tool just to calculate and compare the GHG emissions across different modes of transport.

Even commodity-wise comparison of emissions, is available for devising a total cost of transportation being undertaken, including its environmental cost, between movement by road and rail.

Apart from filling in the gap areas of logistic sector, these two tools will help India achieve sustainability in its most polluting arena as well as increase India’s ranking in Logistics Performance Index (LPI), that stood 44th on the LPI in 2018.

Though Indian government in time, has brought many other initiatives to synchronize and improvise the logistics and associated sector.

They built a Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) that facilitated a high speed, high capacity railway corridor or the Multimodal Logistics Park that aims to reduce the trade cost by 10% and have plans to introduce National Logistics Law 2020 to facilitate growth in logistics ecosystem in India.

However, SLDE stands special as this will help logistics sector to prosper but without emissions and with sustainability.

Building a resilient logistics:

Even in the backdrop of Covid, where demand slumped and manufacturing felt an unreasonable blow, pushing the global economy on the brink of collapse. Still the recovery has not been clear enough.

And this confluence of supply and demand aftershocks have put a considerable pressure on the logistics sector.

Most cargo companies saw declining trade, airlines faced bankruptcy, facing even operational challenges.

Therefore. there is a greater need realized to ‘build back better’ even in logistic sector that helped in providing the necessities even during the pandemic.

By Alaina Ali Beg

I am a lover of all arts and therefore can dream myself in all places where the World takes me. I am an avid animal lover and firmly believes that Nature is the true sorcerer.

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