The Hindu Business Line : Rlys sees 25-30 mt more traffic from freight forwarders

In a bid to attract lost share of piecemeal traffic by offering attractive rates to freight forwarders, the Railways expects to garner about 25-30 million tonnes additional annual traffic in the short run and about 40-50 mt in the long run.

"Currently, 90-95 per cent of the Railways' traffic is through block rakes.

"This doesn't mean that piecemeal traffic does not exist," said Mr S.B. Ghosh Dastidar, Member (Traffic).

The overloaded trucks plying between major business centres are a proof of that. There's enough traffic between the metros, mini-metros, and specific business centres in the country that can generate 25-30 mt of additional traffic annually in the short run, he said.

The need is to have aggregators and distributors at the terminal destinations, he added.

"We have to give attractive rates to freight forwarders."

Referring to the move of the Railways to increase public and private interest in rail-side warehousing, he said that several warehouse operators might find it profitable to have freight forwarding operations.

"Since there were several points of handling, the Railways witnessed high transit time, apart from theft, pilferage, complaints, and high costs of operation," Mr Ghosh Dastidar said. In fact when the Railways set up Concor, apart from handling containerised traffic in the exim and domestic segments, Concor was also expected to aggregate domestic piecemeal traffic. However, it hasn't really emerged as an aggregator.

In the latest Budget, for freight forwarders, the Railways has introduced `low rated classes' of freight charges for round trip loadings in the long distance segment (over 700 km) - LR 2 and LR 1 in the non-peak and peak season respectively.

`Low rated classes' are those charges that are lower than the `break-even' level of charges and thus, do not cover the cost of operations as computed by the Railways.

While LR1 charges are about 10 per cent lower than the break-even charges, LR2 charges are 20 per cent lower.