Amazon India on Wednesday said it has partnered with the Indian railways on a pilot programme to carry out inter-city transportation of e-commerce packages.
This partnership is the first in the e-commerce industry to enable the Indian Railways to build an e-commerce product for freight transportation via rail.
Amazon India is currently transporting customer packages with the Indian Railways on three routes from New Delhi to Mumbai, Mumbai to New Delhi and New Delhi to Kolkata.
The company has seen improvement in speed for ground transportation of its packages and increased reliability for packages transported through the railways network. With the initial learnings, Amazon India is working with the Indian Railways to build an e-commerce transportation product that will enhance capacity planning, contract payment methods, infrastructure and security of freight movement via the rail network.
”We are constantly innovating on behalf of our customers and building partnerships that creates new ways of reaching them. The reach and speed of the Indian Railways will further help us fulfil customer orders faster and reliably across the country. We are committed to a long-term partnership with the Indian railways, and are excited to partner with them to build freight movement solutions for the e-commerce industry, leveraging the vast railways network, based on the learnings from our pilot. ” said Abhinav Singh, Director – Middle Mile Transportation, Amazon India.
”Partnering with the e-commerce sector is an important step towards building a sustainable model that will utilize the railways’ capacity. The learnings from the partnership with an e-commerce player like Amazon will help us build a long term, robust product for the rest of the industry” said sources from Indian Railways.
Amazon India will continue to partner and create more opportunities to leverage the infrastructure built by the Indian Railways. Last month, Indian Railways partnered with Amazon India for a pilot project to set up pickup kiosks in 4 railway stations across Mumbai. The initiative was launched as a pilot in Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, Thane, Dadar and Kalyan railway stations. Customers can select these points as a pick-up location on the checkout page of their order while shopping on Amazon.in. (UNI)
