An Indecisive Indian

  I recently wrote in this blog, https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2025/09/awarded-rewarded-and-thoroughly.html that there are many folks like me, sporting a few half-plucked feathers in our caps, who periodically get invited to be both honoured and humiliated at the same time. Honours for lesser mortals like me are like confetti, pretty, harmless, and soon swept away or worse still, like those glittery party-balloons that hover for a while, bobbing smugly above your head, and then, at the precise moment you try to look dignified, they slip, explode, and leave you with a face full of helium and the smell of fried samosas. My many experiences involved an invitation to be both bedizened and bemused, lauded and at once mortified in public, a ceremonial two-step I’ve come to call “the garlanded casualty” waltz, a dance I now perform with the grace of an arthritic ballerina and the resignation of a government file. I have, therefore, with time, become a trifle philosophical too an...

  India’s logistics ecosystem sits at a pivotal juncture. The National Logistics Policy (NLP), launched in September 2022, was designed to transform the sector from a costly, fragmented system into an integrated, technology-driven network, aiming to reduce logistics costs from 13–14 per cent to 8 per cent of GDP by 2030, thereby boosting trade competitiveness, productivity, and employment. Complementing this has been the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan (2021), which seeks to knit multiple modes of transport into a seamless grid of connectivity, anchored by multimodal logistics parks and coordinated infrastructure planning.   Indian Railways (IR), by far the greenest and most energy-efficient mode, was expected to be the backbone of this transformation. Policy targets such as raising the rail share of freight from 27 to 45 per cent, doubling average freight speeds from 25 to 50 km/h, and achieving 3,000 million tonnes of originating loading by 2027 were embedded in the ...