India’s largest car manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki India, on Tuesday said that it has delivered over7.2 lakh vehicles using Indian Railways. The company transported over 1.8 lakh vehicles in the last financial year compared to nearly 88,000 vehicles since it started in 2016-17.
The increased focus on using railways has helped the company offset over 3,200 MT of CO2 emissions cumulatively.
The company has been progressively increasing the use of railways for its vehicle transportation. Transportation by rail exceeded 1.8 lakh in FY21, which accounts for nearly 13% of total sales in the same period.
Explaining the objective of using railways for transporting vehicles, Kenichi Ayukawa, Managing Director & CEO, Maruti Suzuki India, said, “The transportation of finished vehicles via railways has many tangible benefits. It is a clean, environment-friendly mode of transportation. It reduces congestion on highways, and there is more space available for other vehicles. Therefore, as a conscious effort at Maruti Suzuki, we have taken important steps to enhance vehicle transportation via railways.We thank the Ministry of Railways for their support, which helped increase our volumes transported via rail. In the last five years, over 7.2 lakh vehicles have been dispatched via railways, nearly 1.8 lakh by far the highest in FY21 alone.”
FY17 saw a total of 67,747 MS vehicles delivered through railways which reduced about 422 MT of CO2. The number of vehicles transported using Indian Railways increased, and the carbon footprint of MS reduced gradually by each year.
Maruti Suzuki started off by using the single deck rakes for transporting their vehicles. These rakes were converted from the passenger bogies. Each rake has a capacity of carrying 125 vehicles at a time.
As the demand for vehicles grew, the need for dedicated cargo wagons increased. The design team of Indian railways RDSO, in conjunction with Maruti Suzuki, designed a twin deck rake. These rakes had an increased capacity of carrying 225 vehicles at a time as opposed to 125 vehicles by the previous rake.
As of now, the company uses 36 of these rakes to transport their vehicles. There are a total of five loading terminals on the list currently.
These terminals are Gurgaon, Farukhnagar, Kathuwas, Patli and Detroj, while the 15 destination terminals include Bangalore, Nagpur, Mumbai, Guwahati, Mundra Port, Indore, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, NCR, Siliguri, Coimbatore, Pune, and Agartala.