THERE are 36 gradations in India’s archaic caste system, from the priestly to the supposedly untouchable. And then, somewhere below that, are the long-haul truck-drivers. Driving along India's potholed highways for weeks at a time, few can settle into anything like a home life.
Despite an oversupplied national job market, the industry is struggling to attract the 1 million new drivers it needs each year to keep everything from Amazon packages to car parts moving. Can technology help?
To fend off shortages, most truck owners have done precisely what economists suggest, which is to increase pay. Drivers now get nearly 40,000 rupees ($610) a month, a decent white-collar wage—and not far from double the level of trucker pay just three years ago.
Rivigo, a startup based in Gurgaon, an industrial city near Delhi, is using a different road map. Since its founding in 2014, it has set up a network of 70 “pitstops” across India, each around 200-300km down the road from each other. From those, it organises a pan-India relay system, where drivers drive 4 or 5 hours from their “home” station to the next. They then drive back to their starting point in another vehicle, and clock off in time to make it home for supper most nights. Another colleague is then responsible for driving the load to the next waypoint, and so on.
Administering this logistical ballet is not simple. Clever software predicts precisely when trucks arrive and leave pit-stops and which petrol stations they might refuel at most cheaply. A trip from Bangalore to Delhi takes eight different legs. But by keeping the truck on the road more or less permanently, it takes 44 hours to cover the distance of 2,200km, compared with the 96 hours a conventional trucker takes once rest breaks, meals and so on are factored in.
Rivigo claims it has no trouble hiring drivers for the roughly 2,500 trucks it now owns and operates. At a pitstop two hours south of Delhi, Naresh Kumar, a “pilot”, as Rivigo calls its drivers, says he misses little from his decade of pan-India trucking before he joined the company two years ago. “From being home once or twice a month, I’m now home most nights,” he says.
Rivigo may go down an Uber-like road. Deepak Garg, the founder, says that within a few years he wants Rivigo to be out of the business of owning its own trucks, and focused instead on organising the relay for whichever trucking firm wishes to participate in it.
Mr Garg claims relay is 15% cheaper than conventional trucking and speaks of the efficiencies of the relay system with evangelical enthusiasm.
Will other firms pick up the baton?
Article from The Economist
