Solution: Better connecting roads can be constructed from the towns and cities to important villages with Private Public Participation and a Central Hub method of transportation can be used to and from the district centre to villages to reduce the cost as well as improve connectivity.
2. Challenge – Congestion of National Highways: The National Highways which constitute only 1.7% of the total roads in India carry over 40% of the total freight traffic which keeps on increasing year over the year. With this increasing freight traffic and owing to most of the state highways being two lane highways, there is a congestion of these roads which leads to higher transit time. Ongoing construction work and diversions due to road accidents also hamper the traffic.
Solutions:
• Expansion of existing state and national highways to 4 lane and 6 lane roads.
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3.Challenge – Multiple Checkpoints: Due to a number of reasons such as octroi duty, security reasons and to curb illegal smuggling, there are multiple checkpoints that a truck has to pass through while travelling from one state to another. The existence of multiple checkpoints along the way increases the unavoidable stoppage time for the transporters and also is a reason for traffic jams near the check points.
Solutions:
• Develop a model for mitigating the stoppage time at the checkpoints
• Centralize the collection of octroi and other duties
Railway issues : In the past year, Rail freight has increased from 926.3 M tons to over 1000 M tons according to United Nations Statistical Yearbook for Asia Pacific as indicated by the graph below but ironically , in the interim railway budget, no mention was made of having extra coaches or trains to accommodate this increase in freight traffic. This indicates the extent of neglect that railways are met with while considering the freight transport.
Railways are better as compared to the roadways in terms of cost as well as transit time and hence it is beneficial for India to focus on diverting the freight traffic from roadways to railways.
The following are the challenges that railways face as a mode of freight transport and the possible solutions to the existing challenges:
1. Challenge - High rail freight tariff: Following populist policies, it is mandatory for the Railway Minister to subsidize the travel expenses of passengers and this burden of subsidies is thereby levied on the freight traffic which makes the freight tariff prohibitively high. As compared to USA, the freight tariff in India is 4.3 times. The Passenger/km tariff is 0.006$ and for Freight, the tariff is 0.21$ according to Indian Railways statistical report).
Solutions:
• Judicious provision of subsidies to passenger travel in a manner that doesn’t harm the interests of transporters.
• Allocation of one or more coaches for freight to trains running on less busy routes i.e. running trains with mixed combination of passengers and freight.