BRIEF supported the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, in conducting the Assessment of Logistics Cost in India FY 2023–24.

Mr. Afaq Hussain served as Co-Author and expert consultant on the report, contributing to the study’s analytical framework and findings. The study aimed to estimate India’s total logistics cost through a comprehensive, scientifically grounded methodology – measuring cost at an aggregate level, on a per-tonne-per-kilometre basis, and as a percentage of the value of produce – in support of the National Logistics Policy’s goal of reducing logistics costs and strengthening national competitiveness.

NCAER engaged BRIEF as the field-survey execution agency, responsible for primary data collection across India under the continuous field supervision and guidance of the NCAER team. Working within the study’s hybrid (top-down and bottom-up) framework, BRIEF conducted an in-person, nationwide stakeholder survey covering the full spectrum of logistics players, including road transporters, warehousing operators, freight forwarders, terminal operators, and agents from ICDs, CHAs, and CFSs, alongside liners and other key persons in the logistics chain. Fieldwork spanned the five study regions—North, South, East, West, and North-East—with origin-destination routes drawn from e-way bill data and structured to ensure broad geographic and commodity coverage across more than a thousand unique origin-destination pairs.

The central contribution of BRIEF’s fieldwork was the granular cost-component data that allowed total logistics cost to be unbundled into its constituent drivers. The survey decomposed road transportation cost into fuel, toll charges, driver wages, informal payments, and a residual category spanning maintenance, insurance, permits, miscellaneous costs, and operator margins. This breakdown established fuel as by far the largest single cost driver at roughly 41 percent of total logistics cost, with driver wages near 8 percent, toll charges around 7 percent, and informal payments close to 4 percent – the last offering a quantified measure of regulatory and on-road inefficiency. Because the data were captured at the route level, BRIEF was able to render these component shares not only nationally but region-by-region across the North, South, East, and West, exposing how the cost structure shifts with geography.

Beyond the component split, BRIEF’s data fed the study’s core cost metrics: average cost per kilometre and average cost per tonne per kilometre, disaggregated by region, distance band, commodity (including electrical appliances, food products, fruits and vegetables, textiles, and iron and steel), and individual origin-destination corridor, complemented by warehousing cost data and a region-to-region cost matrix. Together, these primary-data findings gave NCAER and DPIIT the evidence base to pinpoint the principal drivers of logistics cost, quantify regional and commodity-level variation, and identify the inefficiencies impeding cargo movement – feeding directly into the national logistics cost estimate and the study’s data-driven policy recommendations.