India’s logistics sector accelerates green transition with new digital and policy initiatives

India’s logistics industry is harnessing digital tools, government policies, and private-sector innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promising a greener and more competitive future for the sector.

India’s logistics sector, long a linchpin of the country’s economic expansion, faces a mounting environmental reckoning as freight movement, warehousing and suboptimal routing amplify greenhouse gas emissions. While road haulage still dominates the landscape, ...

a convergence of digital tools, government policy and private-sector initiatives is creating tangible pathways to shrink the industry’s carbon footprint without undermining its role in growth.

At the heart of the transition is better data. Digital visibility and analytics can reduce empty runs, improve modal mix decisions and raise asset utilisation across long-haul and last‑mile networks. According to the National Logistics Policy and related multimodal transport efforts, consolidating information flows and enabling cross‑modal planning are intended to make rail, coastal and inland waterway options more practicable for shippers who today too often default to road transport. Industry pilots that link carriers, terminals and shippers seek to turn those policy aims into everyday routing and load‑planning choices.

A concrete example of such digital infrastructure is the Unified Logistics Interface Platform (ULIP). The platform aims to bring together road, rail and maritime partners so that consignors can coordinate shipments across modes, reducing redundant trips and improving overall utilisation. Work by the TCI–IIMB Supply Chain Sustainability Lab at IIM Bangalore, in collaboration with ULIP, has produced a harmonised set of emissions factors to be applied across freight movements. According to the researchers and ULIP proponents, pairing a standardised emissions methodology with a shared logistics platform enables firms to measure greenhouse gas intensity consistently and to prioritise lower‑carbon routing and consolidation tactics.

Private companies are moving rapidly to add operational tools that convert insight into action. Mahindra Logistics has introduced an Emission Analytics Report within its EDeL green logistics ecosystem, offering customers near real‑time visualisation of carbon outputs alongside metrics such as fuel consumption and emissions intensity. Mahindra Logistics has also announced a technology tie‑up with Sangti Solutions to embed carbon KPIs across transport and warehousing services, targeting Scope 3 emissions for industries including automotive, e‑commerce and manufacturing as part of the company’s stated goal of carbon neutrality by 2040. The firm says these capabilities will help clients track and reduce end‑to‑end supply‑chain emissions.

Large logistics and logistics‑adjacent players are experimenting with other levers, too. Federal Bank’s collaboration with DHL Express India under the Go‑Green Plus initiative employs sustainable aviation fuel to tackle emissions from international couriers, an approach aimed at cutting Scope 3 impacts from overseas transport. Such offsets and fuel‑switching measures are being used alongside efficiency gains to address emissions that fall outside a single company’s operational boundary.

On the technology front, cloud migration and more efficient compute infrastructure are emerging as non‑transport pathways to decarbonisation. A study commissioned by Amazon Web Services and carried out by Accenture found that migrating AI workloads to AWS cloud data centres can dramatically lower emissions compared with on‑premises servers, with AWS’s global infrastructure cited as materially more energy efficient. Earlier analysis by 451 Research reached similar conclusions about the energy savings of moving enterprise computing into modern cloud facilities. For logistics operators increasingly dependent on analytics and AI for route optimisation and demand forecasting, these IT efficiencies can reduce the indirect carbon burden of digital operations.

The potential for emissions savings is not only environmental but economic. Reduced fuel usage, improved fleet scheduling and better warehouse energy management can cut operating costs and enhance margins. Industry observers note that customers and global buyers are placing rising value on traceable, low‑carbon supply chains, so firms that can demonstrate measurable emissions reductions may win commercial advantage.

That said, scaling these gains faces obstacles. The logistics base in India remains highly fragmented, with many small trucking operators that lack digital capability. Standardising data collection, incentivising telematics adoption and ensuring interoperable platforms are essential to spread benefits beyond large integrators. Public‑private collaboration will be crucial to overcome these barriers; policymakers and industry groups are already pursuing incentives, common standards and capacity building to accelerate uptake.

Targets and sectoral commitments are beginning to crystalise. Maritime India Vision and other government programmes point toward modal shifts and efficiency benchmarks , for example, national goals to lower carbon intensity in port and coastal movements by 2030 , while corporate pledges and partnerships seek measurable reductions in scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

Taken together, these developments suggest a pragmatic route to greening logistics: combine standardised measurement with interoperable digital platforms, shift freight where economically and operationally viable to lower‑carbon modes, and adopt cleaner fuels and more efficient IT. If realised at scale, such an approach could decouple logistics growth from proportional increases in emissions, turning the sector into a testbed for India’s broader low‑carbon transition and a competitive asset in increasingly sustainability‑sensitive global supply chains.

Source: Noah Wire Services