Warehousing as the New Infrastructure

How India Is Rebuilding Storage as a Core Layer of the Logistics Network

Warehousing has historically occupied a modest place in India’s infrastructure planning, developed in step with factories and highways rather than as a priority in its own right. Over the past few years, that position has shifted meaningfully, as storage has moved from a supporting function to a defined layer of national infrastructure. A new government study by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, conducted with the National Council of Applied Economic Research, has placed India’s logistics cost at 7.97% of GDP for 2023–24. This is a sharp fall from the 13 to 14% figure that had been quoted for years. Warehousing, and the policy attention now flowing into it, is central to that shift.

Warehousing Finds Its Place in Policy

Under the National Logistics Policy, launched in 2022, the development of logistics parks was named one of eight core action areas under the government’s Comprehensive Logistics Action Plan, alongside digital systems, human resource development, and EXIM logistics. The policy’s stated ambition is to place India among the top 25 countries on the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index by 2030, a target that requires warehousing to receive the same policy attention as roads and ports. The PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan, launched in 2021, gives this planning a shared map, so that a new warehouse and the rail or road line feeding it get designed together, in optimal sync.

Warehouses Built With a Railway Line Attached

The clearest evidence of this shift is the Multi Modal Logistics Park (MMLP) programme under Bharatmala Pariyojana, which set out to build 35 such parks across the country. Each MMLP bundles warehousing and cold storage with rail sidings, container yards, and customs clearance on a single site, so cargo moves between transport modes without leaving the facility. The park at Mappedu in Tamil Nadu, spread over 184.27 acres, was designed this way from the outset, with large-scale warehousing paired with road and rail connectivity at an estimated cost of INR 1,424 crore.  In April 2025, the MMLP at Nagpur began commercial operations under a public-private partnership; its first rake carried 123 cars in from Farukhnagar. Built at a cost of INR 673 crore, the facility includes bonded warehousing alongside cold storage and customs facilities. Here, the warehouse and the highway function as a single system, built together, rather than being merely placed next to each other.

Making a Warehouse Bankable

More than just square footage and rail sidings, warehousing infrastructure also has to be trusted enough to lend against. That’s the role of the Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA), set up under the Warehousing (Development and Regulation) Act, 2007. Produce stored in a WDRA-registered warehouse comes with insurance cover, periodic inspection, and scientific storage protocols. Moreover, the depositor walks away with an electronic negotiable warehouse receipt (e-NWR) that banks will lend against. For a farmer, that receipt is the difference between selling a harvest immediately at whatever price the market offers that week and storing it to sell later on better terms. Government bodies including the Food Corporation of India and NAFED now require their central pool stock to sit in WDRA-registered warehouses, pushing more of the country’s storage capacity toward this standard.

Warehousing Enters the City Plan

The newest layer of this shift is happening closer to the ground. Under the Strengthening Multimodal and Integrated Logistics Ecosystem (SMILE) programme, launched across eight pilot cities in 2025, warehousing clusters are being mapped alongside truck terminals and e-commerce delivery routes, and folded directly into city master plans and land use policy. Warehouse sites are now picked as part of the city’s freight plan, not on land price alone.

As India works toward single-digit logistics costs and a place among the world’s top 25 logistics economies by 2030, the warehouse is pulling as much weight as other important infrastructural aspects like highways & ports.