India’s air cargo capacity is limited by flight disruptions, forcing express firms to use delayed road transport and creating major backlogs.
Due to the ongoing IndiGo disruption, which has limited airfreight capacity and forced the majority of express consignments onto already congested road routes, courier networks have been pushed off schedule.
Businesses in Delhi, Mumbai, and other centres have reported significant backlogs as a result of the impact, which has spread to a variety of industries, from farmers shipping perishables to clients attempting to transmit critical paperwork. Both local and international shipments have been negatively impacted, according to Manoj Yadav, owner of AGS Logistics, a partner of Aramex and Delhivery.
“We manage both regular and expedited shipments. Express travels by air, but airlines are giving passengers priority over goods. Thousands of packages are stranded in Delhi and Mumbai as of December 8. “The express system as a whole has been affected,” he stated. He continued by saying that diverted express consignments are now vying for space with regular goods, which are often transported by truck.
“Delays are reaching two, three, or even more days, and trucks are overloaded.” Certain pin codes are no longer functional. We cover 27,000 pin codes. Large cities receive bulk cargo and reroute it locally, but because of the backlog, the stuff is stopped in these towns and cannot proceed,” he stated.
According to Shekhar Kumbhar, a DTDC franchise operator in Pimpri Chinchwad, the grounding of morning flights necessitates rebooking parcels onto substitute services, which results in a delivery backlog of two to three days. He confirmed that this persistent operational challenge has lasted several days, prompting his team to proactively notify patrons about potential package delays. This level of disruption was echoed by another courier company owner, who noted that significant delays are now affecting parcels that were initially scheduled to be delivered within just two days.
According to Trackon Courier, the impacted airline has a significant influence on its maximum courier load. Packages are currently being diverted by road to the Mumbai airport in order to manage the two-way impact. This causes shipments, like essential documents travelling from Pune to Jodhpur, to be significantly delayed by two to three days. All clients are being actively informed about these updated transit times by the company.
Due to the capacity shortage, SBL Express India has had to remove about 10 tonnes of perishable cargo every day for the last six days in order to save losses on short-shelf-life goods like flowers and fruits. Additionally, the amount of cargo that has been diverted to other airlines has caused extreme congestion, which has caused clearance times at Air India’s Delhi air cargo storage to extend by almost ten hours.
SOURCE – TIMES OF INDIA
