E-commerce giant Amazon will engage with Indian Railways’ Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India, to enable its sellers to deliver faster to their customers across India.
This makes Amazon the first e-commerce company in India to leverage the dedicated freight corridor (DFC) network for shipping customer packages through freight railway routes.
Amazon India’s association with DFC will enable more sustainable mode of transport and faster and reliable delivery of customer packages.
Indian Railways has undertaken a mega-infrastructure project of two dedicated freight corridors, namely Eastern-DFC and Western-DFC to facilitate faster evacuation of freight traffic.
The 1,506-km-long Western-DFC will connect Dadri in Uttar Pradesh to Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust terminal in Maharashtra. It passes through Haryana (177 km), Rajasthan (565 km), Gujarat (565 km) and Maharashtra (177 km), in addition to Uttar Pradesh.
The 1,337-km-long Eastern-DFC starts from Sahnewal near Ludhiana in Punjab, crosses through two other states — Uttar Pradesh and Haryana — and terminates at Sonnagar in Bihar.
Amazon India has already started operations with the DFC on the 659-km-long Rewari-Palanpur (Haryana-Gujarat) route on the Western-DFC. As the DFC network expands over the next few years, Amazon India will add and utilise new freight railway routes and capabilities of the DFC.
Jaya Verma Sinha, the new CEO of Railway Board, Indian Railways said, “I would like to congratulate Amazon India for further strengthening its longstanding association with Indian Railways and being the first e-commerce company in India to transport customer packages using DFC.“
“I hope and expect Amazon India to grow their partnership with Indian Railways manifold in the next few years,” Sinha added.