The barometer for the road freight market in India is based on Rivigo's rate exchange, which gives live spot rate on over 70 lakh lane and vehicle type combinations in the country, Rivigo said in a statement.
"The NFI offers an aggregated picture of both live rates and historical trends of spot price movements in the road freight industry. The index is represented in two forms actual freight rates condensed to rupees per tonne-km, and relative movement with respect to a base month," it said.
"In the existing logistics market structure, there are high inefficiencies due to information asymmetry, which leads to a great loss of value. The NFI will enable unrestricted access and sharing of freight rate information. It will bring transparency in the market and propel the logistics sector towards efficiencies and growth," said Rivigo co-founder Gazal Kalra.
According to the company, both the index and the exchange are based on Rivigo's machine learning and economics powered pricing algorithms. The rates on the exchange and the index are computed using millions of data points from historical transactions, current market dynamics, micro market insights and other factors with the purpose of giving fair and precise representation of the state of the spot market.
The Indian road freight market size for 2018 was estimated to be $150-160 billion. Of this, $130-140 billion was the full truck load (FTL) market. Within this, Rivigo estimates that the spot freight market was about $110-130 billion and was growing at 9-10 per cent a year.
The efficiency of the spot freight marketplace will determine how this growth compounded and the freight index will help all stakeholders to realise their potential.
( With inputs from IANS )