NEW DELHI :The government is set to push for a better Logistics Performance Index (LPI) with plans to report to the World Bank on recent reforms and measures taken to improve logistics efficiency through schemes such as Prime Minister Gati Shaki, an official said on Thursday.
Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) special secretary Sumita Dawra said there was a need to place more emphasis on an objective methodology for LPI scoring, while the World Bank’s methodology was based on surveys of perception.
India aims to enter the top 25 ranking countries by 2030.
In the latest LPI of 2023, India ranks 38th out of 139 countries.
Dawra said DPIIT officials continuously interact with World Bank officials on the need for an objective methodology. The multilateral lender uses six parameters to measure countries’ performance including customs, infrastructure, international shipping, logistics competence, track and trace, and schedules.
”We believe this is a very limited way of ranking India in major global indices and there is a lot of work going on and that should be reflected in the calculations. We have analyzed the parameters and how to do it. We would like the World Bank to include our interventions and reforms that contribute to improving logistics in India,” Dawra said during a press conference.
He also said that the report on a framework to assess India’s logistics costs is ready and will be published by the end of the month.
According to government estimates, India’s logistics costs account for between 8% and 14% of gross domestic product.
“We now have a baseline estimate and from next year we will do a survey-based (exercise) to estimate the cost,” he said, adding that the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the ADB have participated in the exercise. .
Further, the special secretary said the service improvement group constituted in March to resolve logistics-related issues has so far assessed 80 issues from different departments, including revenue, railways and highways.
Of 80, 34 are resolved. There are 21 issues related to CBIC (Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs), such as issues related to some ports, GST and ICEGATE (Indian Customs EDI Gateway).
As many as 106 companies have signed confidentiality agreements with the government to access ULIP data, launched on September 17 last year as part of the national logistics policy.
It is a digital gateway that allows industry players to access logistics-related data sets from various government systems through request-response-based application programming interface (API) integration.
The Ministry of Commerce and Industry also informed that during the recent meeting of the Network Planning Group (NPG) under the PM Gati Shakti programme, as many as six projects, including three projects of the Ministry of Railways (MoR) and three projects of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), with a total project cost of Rs. Rs 14,081 crore was assessed.
“This brings the total number of projects evaluated by NPG to 106 with a total value of approximately $11 crore, since the launch of Prime Minister GatiShakti’s approach,” the ministry said.
(With PTI inputs)