New Delhi: The government on Wednesday flagged off the scaled-up phase of India’s transshipment (TP) cargo reform at Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL), in a bid to position India as a global cargo transshipment hub by leveraging its strategic location between the East and the West.
The network has now been expanded to four additional domestic origin stations; Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Hyderabad along with two new international destinations; London and Copenhagen.
The expanded network is projected to increase Air India’s monthly cargo carriage on these lanes from 1,763 MT to 3,183 MT, an increase of nearly 80 per cent.
Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu kicked off DIAL’s Transshipment Excellence Centre (TEC) at IGI Airport, Terminal 2.
“Based on industry feedback, we identified long-standing requirement of mandatory re-screening of transshipment cargo, as a key bottleneck. By doing away with it we can significantly reducing turnaround time, handling costs and congestion at cargo terminals,” said Naidu.
“The Proof of Concept exercise on the Chennai–Delhi–Frankfurt route has successfully established that by reducing average end-to-end transit time from 60 hours to just 20 hours,” the minister mentioned.
The Proof of Concept for domestic-to-international transshipment commenced on June 20, 2026 on the Chennai–Delhi–Frankfurt sector using DIAL’s TEC, with Air India operating the service end-to-end.
Since its launch, the PoC transshipped 280 MT of cargo, with aircraft capacity utilisation rising from 75 per cent to nearly 100 per cent.
“We are now scaling up this successful model by connecting four more major domestic cargo markets and two new international destinations. Subsequently, we will expand this framework to International-to-International and International-to-Domestic transshipment as well,” said Naidu.
The reform is part of the Government’s broader vision of developing major Indian airports into global transit hubs.
(IANS)
