On July 2, 2021, a consultative meeting on freight smart cities was held which was chaired by Minister of State (MoS) Hardeep Singh (HS) Puri, Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MoCI). During the meeting, the Logistics Division, MoCI unveiled a plan for ‘Freight Smart Cities’ to improve the efficiency of urban freight and to reduce the logistics costs.
- The MoS also launched the website on ‘Freight Smart Cities’ along with the release of a handbook outlining 14 measures that can be taken to improve urban freight with low-cost, and low effort initiatives through relevant PPP (Public Private Partnership).
Key Points:
i.Formation of city-level logistics committees: As a part of Freight Smart Cities initiative, these committees will be formed comprising related government departments and agencies at the local level, state and from the reacted central ministries and agencies. They can also include private sector from the logistics services
- These committees would co-create City Logistics Plans to implement performance improvement measures locally.
ii.The Logistics Division will work closely with GIZ (Germany) under Indo-German Development Cooperation, Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and RMI India.
iii.10 cities will be identified on an immediate basis, and this list will be expanded to 75 cities in the next phase which will further include all state capitals and cities that have more than one million population.
iv.The technical details of plans were also discussed during the meeting and States and cities like Gujarat, Panjim (Goa) , Hyderabad (Telangana), Shimla (Himachal Pradesh) and Amravati (Maharashtra) presented their work for improving city freight logistics.
Background:
The growing urbanization, requirements of rapid economic growth including e-commerce and associated freight movements highlighted the need of city logistics. The first discussion for the same was held with States/UTs (Union Territories) during the first National Conference of States on Logistics on January 19, 2021. Following this Logistics Division engaged in creating a roadmap for improvement in freight movement in the Indian cities where comes the concept of ‘Freight Smart Cities’.
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On April 19, 2021, Piyush Goyal, Union Minister MoCI launched the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS) to provide Financial Assistance to startups for Proof of Concept, Prototype development, product trials, market entry and commercialization for a period of 4 years starting 2021-22.
About Ministry of Commerce and Industry:
Union Minister– Piyush Vedprakash Goyal (Rajya Sabha, Maharashtra)
Minister of State (MoS)– Hardeep Singh Puri (Rajya Sabha, Uttar Pradesh), Som Parkash (Lok Sabha- Hoshiarpur, Punjab)
