Growth not in tune with GDP: PHD

The PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s summit on Logistics & Supply Chain in the capital was attended by more than 120 delegates.

V. Kalyana Rama, Chairman and Managing Director, Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) was the Chief Guest at the summit. He laid stress on the fact that while the GDP is growing at seven per cent plus, the logistics sector is witnessing only about two to three per cent growth. This is primarily due to the large-scale growth of the service sector, which does not result in a high growth in the logistics sector. The recent government’s initiatives like Make in India, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY) are very important steps in the growth of the primary sectors, which will have an overall positive impact on the growth of the logistics sector. This coupled with the implementation of GST and the upcoming DFC (Dedicated Freight Corridor) will bring forth numerous opportunities for the logistics

Anil Khaitan, Senior Vice President, PHD Chamber, said, “Designing an optimal supply chain configuration that can meet the expected growth rates is a challenging task, especially in India. While customers demand improvements in each aspect at ever-lower prices, producers and distributors in India are facing increasing competition in nearly every product category.”

Stressing on customisation across the value chain but from the cold chain perspective, Pawanexh Kohli, Chief Advisor & CEO, National Centre for Cold-chain Development (NCCD), Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Govt. of India, said, “To move something which has a short life cycle, we need to pre-condition it at farm gate; those things are called modern pack houses. All our exports are happening on multi-modal formats but in cold chain we do not even have one single multi-modal refer container at this moment.