By Maria Kalamatas | May 16, 2025
Mumbai —
The trucks are moving faster. The goods are arriving quicker. But now the challenge is what comes next.
India’s ambitious freight corridor projects—designed to boost speed, reduce costs, and modernize long-haul cargo routes—are delivering results. But in 2025, the pressure is shifting to the edges of the system.
“We’ve improved transit time dramatically,” said a senior planner working on the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor. “But once the cargo reaches the end terminal, the roads can’t take it.”
That’s the story playing out in hubs like Dadri, Nagpur, and parts of Gujarat. Double-stacked containers arrive on electrified rail lines, ahead of schedule. Then they sit—stalled by outdated city roads, local traffic, and customs bottlenecks that weren’t built for this kind of volume.
The result? A new kind of congestion.
It’s not happening on the rails. It’s happening just after the rails.
Freight forwarders are adjusting by deploying smaller feeder trucks, rerouting last-mile delivery paths, or even shifting cargo back to slower networks when it makes more sense logistically.
Some municipalities are responding with rapid upgrades: new ring roads, truck-only lanes, and digital scheduling tools to limit bottlenecks during peak hours. But not all regions are keeping pace.
The risk, experts warn, is that India’s freight modernisation effort could plateau—not from a lack of ambition, but from the absence of connective infrastructure.
For now, the trains are running. But unless what surrounds them evolves too, the efficiency gains may stall where the pavement ends.
