On Tuesday Prime Minister Narendra Modi did two things at once before a crowd of largely youngsters in the city of Vadodara. He said a two-decade-old railway megaproject had been completed and he took the opportunity to revive a feud with Rahul Gandhi that has endured for over a decade in Indian politics.In his speech on the "NaMo for Viksit Bharat" event, Modi laid the foundation stone, dedicated and inaugurated projects with investments of over ₹35,000 crore covering highways, housing, water schemes and in the middle of it all, the uncompleted section of the Dedicated Freight Corridor. Commissioning the final three sections of the Western DFC, that are 326 route kilometres in total, have made the entire 2,800-km network across the country fully operational a corridor that was first conceived by the UPA government over two decades ago, and which the government is claiming it has taken 20 years to complete.

The freight corridor is not a trivial entity to get right. It comprises two trunks, one 1,337-km-long eastern broad gauge line that runs through Vadodara approximately from Punjab to Bihar as a coal, steel and foodgrain line, and another 1,504-km-long western broad gauge line from Uttar Pradesh's industrial belt near Dadri to Jawaharlal Nehru Port nearest Mumbai. Combined, the two arms cover the 2,843 route-kilometres the government claims to have completed, adding up to a total of more than ₹1.24 lakh crore, which railway officials have quoted as the cost. Today over 430 freight trains operate on the two corridors and a train crossing 100 km in about 6.5 hours can be made in less than half that time.

Modi took a pointed example because the audience was more young than to remember the corridor's early stormy days. He spoke of a double stack container train which had recently transported goods from Mumbai's JNPT port to Vadodara that has been able to transport the load of over 250 truck loads in a single run. The number is the kind that gets shared well on social media and it was clips of the line were getting shared just within hours, and the railway ministry was sharing them too.

Then there was the politics, as the Prime Minister often does, attacking without naming his enemy. When asked about the objections critics would raise, even on a project this size, Modi grumbled, “(A) naraz fufa (disgruntled uncle) will always come with a complaint, saying what will happen to the truck drivers now that freight is being moved by train and not on the road?” He took a shot at Rahul Gandhi's current student-outreach initiative ‘Chhatron Ki Goonj', calling it ‘Jhooth Ki Goonj' (echo of lies), while addressing the audience, saying that the youth of India ‘walks with the roar of truth'. It was a well-thought-out jibe on Gandhi's own jibe, and a nod to the same people that Gandhi has been going to on campus tours Kota, Dehradun, Prayagraj, Pune who are his biggest supporters.

The historical dig was even more interesting. Although the freight corridor was designed years before, not a single kilometre had been constructed before the Congress-led UPA government came to an end in 2014, Modi claimed, adding that the Congress-led government had managed to construct only 50,000 modern rail coaches in its 10 years. The delay narrative is well supported by independent accounts of the corridor's history, even if not necessarily the exact wording: In 2008, the project was approved by Cabinet, but construction only began in earnest after 2014, when costs increased by about eleven times the initial sanctioned estimate.

But what's really interesting about this story, beyond the rally speech, is the economy. The logistics cost India has been plagued with, i.e. the percentage of its GDP that it spends on moving goods around, is one of the oldest competitive disadvantages in India.Ten years ago India's transportation sector used around 13-14 per cent of GDP, compared to about 8 per cent in the United States and Europe and about 10 per cent in China, leaving Indian manufacturing less competitive in terms of exports.

A recent study by the CII-Knight Frank, released earlier this year, estimated the cumulative investment in the improvement to be in the range of $359.87 billion over 10 years, which equates to $123-133 billion per year as far as savings for the economy are concerned and has boosted India's rankings on the Logistics Performance Index from 54th to 38th place in the world over the 10-year period.

A separate, conservative government estimate, by DPIIT and NCAER, pegged the current figure closer to a 7.97 percent of the GDP for 2023-24, which officials said was the first "methodologically sound domestic estimate" over the decades of previous borrowed external estimates. In either case, the direction is the same and the freight corridor is one of the few things we can point to that is physically and verifiably done, not just announced, of that story.

However, the completion of the corridor does not necessarily mean that the corridor is being used. Despite this commitment from the Western arm this week, industry commenters noted that the lack of cargo aggregation terminals, multimodal logistics parks and last mile connections is the problem, rather than track being laid.

The government's own logistics roadmap admits this: considering India has current rail freight penetration of about 27 per cent of the country's total freight, and aspires to increase it to 45 per cent by 2030, the country's logistics arenas will need approximately 216 multimodal logistics parks by 2047 to achieve the goal. Road transport, which is far more inefficient and expensive per tonne-kilometre than rail, carries the bulk of the heavier loads.