Beyond the tracks

Freight corridors' efficiency gains must be maximised

Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week dedicated to the nation the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC), worth ₹73,000 crore and 1,506 km in length, making it fully operational from Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, to Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), near Mumbai. This marks an important milestone in building India’s second-biggest infrastructure plan — after the Golden Quadrilateral — and its long effort to build a more efficient logistics system. With the 1,337-km Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC) already operational from Ludhiana to Sonnagar (Bihar), India now has a dedicated freight network of 2,843 km. The timing is significant. Indian Railways carried 1,670 million tonnes of freight in 2025-26, up from 1,617 million tonnes in the previous year, underscoring the importance of expanding rail capacity and improving the speed of cargo transportation. As the dedicated corridors free conventional railway lines from freight congestion, they potentially improve both cargo and passenger operations. The freight corridor has more  than halved travel time, with a journey that can take around 30 hours by truck taking just  10-12 hours on the DFC.

 

The corridor, therefore, has the potential to bring industrial centres in north and western India closer to ports. There is also a larger environmental benefit. A greater shift of freight from road to rail can reduce congestion, fuel use, and emission. The government estimates that the shift of freight from road to rail since 2014 has prevented the release of 143.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. It is now important to use the corridors to their full economic potential. The corridors are already carrying 435-440 trains a day against a combined capacity of about 480, indicating strong utilisation but also raising questions about the next stage of efficiency. The challenge is to ensure that congestion does not simply move from railway tracks to terminals, ports and feeder routes. Operators of container trains have pointed to this problem. While double-stacking and faster movement can potentially generate cost savings of around 25 per cent, the benefit is currently estimated at only 6-7 per cent. Restrictive weight and dimension rules, slower double-stack operations, detention at terminals, inadequate feeder connectivity, and additional port-handling charges dilute the gains from the new infrastructure. A dedicated rail line cannot by itself create an efficient logistics chain if the first mile and last mile remain slow and expensive.

 

This is significant when considering India’s logistics costs. The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade’s first comprehensive assessment, prepared with the National Council of Applied Economic Research, estimated logistics costs at 7.97 per cent of gross domestic product in 2023-24. The study also found that smaller firms faced significantly higher logistics costs, making improvement in freight efficiency particularly important for smaller manufacturers and exporters. The government’s focus must, therefore, be optimising the corridor ecosystem. This should include rationalising operating regulations, improving conventional feeder links and interchange points, strengthening JNPT’s rail-handling capacity, and creating seamless multimodal connectivity.