To have a mountain of foodgrain and yet have millions go hungry is embarrassingly painful in itself. For a country that has the tech wherewithal to provide solutions for a variety of everyday needs, the situation is even more discomfiting. It doesn’t have to be so, argues Srinivasan HR, vision holder of TAKE Solutions, that has its key operations spread across India, the United States and Europe, and gets its name from the acronym for Technology, Analytics, Knowledge and Enterprise, and focuses on the twin domains of supply chain management and life sciences. 
Being a high-end solutions provider in the supply chain management domain, TAKE Solutions is not exactly in the areas of warehousing and transportation in itself, but Srinivasan can see the why and why-not of India lagging behind in the overall logistics space. “At a rough estimate, India has a 30-year lag in logistics,” he says, pointing out that the world has come a long way from the early days of hand-held devices for logistics solutions to artificial neural networks and other virtual collaborative solutions. Part of India’s problems in logistics management lies in sheer logistic inefficiency, while the other part lies in fiscal grouping issues, he says. While the poor physical infrastructure stands in the way of efficient physical logistics, on the fiscal side, a multiplicity of domestic tax rules across different states hinders easy movement of any basket of goods. On the global stage, Srinivasan feels that Europe is clearly superior in logistics, with even the SME sector in Europe measuring up to state-of-the-art systems, compared to which the United States SME sector’s practices may look rudimentary. 
So what ails the Indian logistics space, particularly in the public sector? Is it plain ignorance, or inertia on the part of the government? “Certainly, it cannot be ignorance, for the government is full of capable and knowledgeable people. So, it is not a question of lack of awareness. What seems lacking is a number of intra-country fiscal issues and lack of co-ordination between a number of government departments that have to be involved in any kind of logistics operation,” says Srinivasan. 
That, he notes, is also a micro picture of the global situation, where he feels the European Union and Nafta seem to have taken off in better fashion, while the same cannot be said about the Asean grouping, where logistics appears below par, and in Saarc, where political differences have created hurdles. “With our tech capability, there is no reason why the public distribution system can’t be on the cloud, from procurement to storage to distribution. Perhaps, individual states can set the early trend and then the entire system can migrate to the cloud,” he says. 
However, there are a few reasons why not everyone, including the government, is jumping into the cloud fray. Two of the key reasons are capex decisions and information security worries. The security worries, in turn, hinge on likely audit queries. “It is normal buyer behaviour to be cautious of adopting any new technology and that applies to cloud adoption as well. The cloud can be penetrated, and to that extent, it is difficult answering an audit query whether one is in complete control of one’s information on the cloud. All of these have slowed cloud adoption,” says Srinivasan. 
That the Indian logistics sector has a long way to go is evident from TAKE Solutions’ revenue break-up itself. Even as the company braces to reach a business volume of . 1,000 crore this fiscal, as much as 63% of its current volumes are contributed by the US business while Asia contributes 30%, of which India accounts for only 2%. That, however, should not deny India the credit for having come a long way in cargo handling at airports and seaports over the past five years, says Srinivasan, though the point to note is that India still has much catching up to do. And that points to an opportunity. 
Srinivasan quotes a Frost & Sullivan study to point out that India's logistics industry is set to be a $120-billion market by 2014, driven by growth in the manufacturing sector. 
Leading a tech company with 1,250 staff across eight countries, Srinivasan can forsee companies that devote themselves to purely managing the brand, outsourcing everything else, and technology evolving to enable this. “It will be an always-fresh, alwaysavailable model, powered by technology. In this concept, companies will control everything related to the brand management, and that marks the advent of fourth-party logistics, where even core functions are outsourced and the owners control the brand part,” feels Srinivasan. That’s a concept worth dreaming, whether for a brand-managing corporate or a government concerned with efficient running of the national public distribution system.

SRINIVASAN H R IS FOUNDER OF TAKE Solutions