Rivigo launches national freight index

Majority of cargo movement --an indicator of economic activity -- happens on roads in India. And with truck transportation being a highly unorganised sector, there is lack of transparency on the freight rates.

To bridge this gap, Rivigo, a technology-enabled logistics company which owns 3,000 trucks on Thursday launched the National Freight Index (NFI) based on the study of truck rentals in last three years.

The free of charge freight index shows the truck rentals of 1,500 origin and destination locations (a minimum of 250 km) and 30 types of trucks, Gazal Kalra, co-founder, Rivigo told BusinessLine.

Of these, goods movement of around 1,000 locations, account for 70 per cent of cargo movement.

This data, which was earlier available to users of Rivigo app, can now be accessed by all. The index shows two kinds of data – actual freight rates condensed to Rs per tonne-km, and the change with respect to a base month.

Both the index and the exchange are based on Rivigo’s machine learning and economics powered pricing algorithms, which are continuously improving on accuracy.

The rates on the exchange and index are computed using millions of data points from historical transactions, current market dynamics, micro market insights and other factors to give a fair and precise representation of the state of the spot market in the country, said the company release.