Container shipping measures performance obsessively at the ocean and the terminal: vessel schedules, berth waiting times, freight indexes, and port throughput. For good reason, those are the stages where the industry has spent decades building standardization, and where a single carrier or terminal operator can move the needle for thousands of shipments at once. Every metric this publication tracks daily, from freight rate indexes to service adjustments to berth congestion updates, exists because the ocean and port side of the supply chain finally became measurable, comparable, and manageable at scale.
But for cargo bound for an import-heavy, road-dependent market like India, a container clearing the port gate on schedule is not the same as that cargo reaching its destination on schedule. Increasingly, the gap between those two events is where the hard-won efficiency of the ocean leg quietly disappears, and it’s a gap that gets almost none of the attention the industry pays to the stages before it.
The pressure has already shifted inland
The statistics are no longer confined to anecdotal evidence. Major ports in India have handled a record 915 million tonnes of cargo in the last financial year. More importantly, in terms of volume of containerized cargo, India’s largest container port, JNPA, has moved a record 7.9 million TEUs in the last fiscal year. Experts tracking the development of the logistics sector say the pressure is moving beyond the port gates and is being felt in terms of driver shortages, congestion on approaches to the port, and delays at container freight stations. In terms of volume, road transport is now moving 20,000 TEUs a day as against 2,000 by the rails at JNPA, and hence trailer and driver are the critical variables that determine whether the cargo is moving or not once it has been unloaded from the ship.This is the same capacity-imbalance problem that shows up whenever one node in a network absorbs pressure that a connected node could have shared, just playing out at port scale rather than at the level of individual hubs.”
The implication is a significant one for the global shipping community to grasp: India’s largest container port for volume handles ten times the volume of cargo moving by road than by rail. All the speed that a carrier might be able to generate in clearing their vessels, and all the productivity that a terminal operator can develop in terms of crane cycles, gets dissipated in the transfer of that volume to the road for inland evacuation. And the scheduling, the planning and control of a large volume of trucks is very, very different from the scheduling, planning and control of trains.
The delays that happen on the inland section of the journey get hidden from view in shipping metrics such as a vessel’s schedule and a port’s throughput. As a report in The Journal of Commerce cited a regional 3PL and noted that “as volume has grown, import clearance has slowed to 15-20 days for rail-bound cargo evacuation from JNPA,” the Mundra-based terminal and India’s largest port by cargo volume is seeing huge delays. As CargoX CEO Darren Wietzke, who was part of a recent delegation of execs to visit JNPA, noted in a recent LinkedIn post, “A container can clear customs and leave the terminal and still take 2-3 weeks to get to a distribution center, factory, or retailer’s shelf.” In shipping metrics, this means the container’s ‘journey’ has been successful, but, from an importer’s perspective, the shipment is late, and that’s not reflected in any of the shipping industry’s metrics.
Why the inland leg doesn’t behave like the ocean leg
One thing to note is the huge difference in structure between how ocean freight operates and how inland trucking operates in India. While the ocean freight market has a manageable number of large carriers (deploying scheduled services) and shares a host of industry infrastructure (e.g., shared booking platforms, tracking standards, and port coordination protocols), the inland market comprises an extremely fragmented set of small, independent transporters and owner-operators of very small fleets (typically 5-10 trucks) that have no shared booking platform to speak of. In terms of compliance, there is no shared standard for tools and processes that are used. Also, the history of tracking and visibility in this market is largely nonexistent once a truck leaves the port.
However, this level of consolidation is not going to happen on the road transport front in the near future. The road transport sector comprises a large number of independent operators who own small fleets of vehicles. They can’t be bundled into a single unified entity to cater to the demands of the shipping community. In this scenario, the solution would have to come from software that can coordinate and manage this multitude of operators to render a seamless and integrated logistics service to the shippers and forwarders.
Closing the gap without consolidating the market
This is the specific problem Libera, the AI-powered freight platform built on a decade of ElasticRun’s experience running some of India’s largest and most fragmented logistics networks, was built to solve. Rather than assuming a shipper works with a handful of large, sophisticated carriers, Libera’s transportation management system is designed around a market of thousands of small transporters: onboarding and verifying vendors with automated checks, routing each shipment to the right procurement path, a known local vendor, a contracted lane partner, or a real-time spot bid and running compliance automatically, including the e-way bill and checkpost documentation that account for a meaningful share of India’s inland detention time in the first place.
Visibility is the other half of the problem, and it matters just as much once a container has been trucked out of a congested port yard onto a multi-day inland haul. Libera’s execution layer runs a layered GPS, SIM, FASTag, and IoT tracking chain specifically because a single signal source is unreliable across the kind of terrain, connectivity gaps, and multi-state routing an inland haul out of a port like Mundra or JNPA actually involves the same fragmented, unpredictable conditions that make the last mile of a shipment’s ocean journey the least visible part of the entire trip for the international logistics teams tracking it from a dashboard thousands of miles away.
A problem that’s only getting bigger
The logjam is here to stay as global trade makes a transition to India. As the volume of shifted trade to India increases, it will put enormous pressure on the evacuation infrastructure that is already struggling to cope with the growing volume of cargo at Indian ports. For global shippers, freight forwarders, and 3PLs alike, a parallel and rigorous approach to manage the ‘inland leg,’ as is currently the case with scheduling vessels and managing the volume of cargo at Indian ports, is inevitable. Needless to say, the inland leg of container movement will be a huge spoilage in terms of achieving the time saved in evacuation of cargo from the port.
About the Author:
Sritama Sanyal is a Product Marketing Manager at Libera, who is deeply passionate about exploring technological advancements that are widely utilized but often underappreciated, with a keen interest in AI-driven innovations. Enthusiastic about the rapid transformations in the logistics and supply chain industry, Sritama aspires to educate and inform about cutting-edge technologies and their practical applications. Her expertise and curiosity drive her to uncover and share insights that empower businesses to stay ahead in an ever-evolving landscape.
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