CargoX’s Platform for Blockchain Document Transfer (BDT) has been chosen by India’s maritime industry to improve document processing and the flow of goods in the country’s ports.
In a statement, CargoX said it had entered a partnership with Portall Infosystems, a company responsible for building India’s electronic port community system to digitalize the processing of bills of lading and the transfer of trade documents.
This follows Portall Infosystem’s successful testing of CargoX’s BDT platform, which examined its ability to handle the needs of India’s maritime industry, particularly in procession electronic bills of lading.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it necessary to utilise smart technologies and innovations, such as an electronic bill of lading, to clear the backlog of goods at ports.
In a recent PTI webinar on the value of the port digitisaion, it was predicted that the pandemic would accelerate the implementation of an electronic bill of lading.
PTI Technical Paper – TradeLens and India: Blockchain, progress and opportunities
The Government of India has started evaluating ways to implement electronic bills of lading, electronic delivery orders, certificates of origin, letters of credit, and other trade documentation across all EXIM transactions in India.
The Indian Port Community System has seen rapid three-fold growth of users since 2018, when Portall successfully won the tender to modernize the PCS.
The main goal was to improve India’s ease of doing business (EODB) rankings, reduce health risks, and avoid bottlenecks caused during the handling paper-intensive process for export-import (EXIM) cargo at their ports by digitalizing the processes.
The dozen major ports in India handle approximately 60% of the country’s total cargo traffic. In 2019-20 that was close to 705 million tonnes of cargo, and 20,837 vessels that were handled by these ports.
“We have developed the CargoX Platform for contactless, distributed online teamwork – and we are glad we did,” said Stefan Kukman, CEO and founder of CargoX.
“In these times of multiple risks to our common society, we are proud to help shipping companies resolve supply chain document sending issues and enables them to meet delivery deadlines everywhere in the world, in a secure and efficient manner, while also lowering the document transfer cost.”