India moves on its trucks. Road transport carries close to 70 per cent of the country's freight, and behind that number sits an industry of largely owner-managed fleets running on single-digit margins. As India enters its most significant growth phase in decades, with the National Logistics Policy targeting a fall in logistics costs from around 14 per cent of GDP to single digits, this sector is not a participant in that ambition. It is the condition for it.
Which makes one fact worth examining. Fuel is the single largest input cost in a commercial vehicle business, running between 30 and 50 per cent of total operating expenditure. It is also, almost universally, the least measured.
Consider how it typically works. A vehicle detours to a retail outlet before the day's first delivery. The driver fills up. A paper slip returns to the office. Somewhere in that sequence, the business loses the ability to say what it actually received.
The numbers are uncomfortable. Indian fleets are estimated to lose between ₹25,000 and ₹52,000 per truck every month to fuel theft. On a fifty-truck operation, that is upwards of ₹1.5 crore a year, gone without a trace. Separately, an estimated 10 to 20 per cent of fuel is wasted through idling and unplanned detours, and those detours add 15 to 30 per cent to trip time, directly reducing how many trips an asset completes in a day.
Quality compounds it. Adulterated or contaminated fuel raises specific fuel consumption by 5 to 10 per cent and damages injectors and pumps over time. A fleet owner watching mileage fall often diagnoses an engine problem when the real problem entered through the nozzle.
Then there is timing. Fuel bills fall due weekly while client payments arrive in 30 to 60 days. That mismatch has broken more small fleets than any single price hike.
None of this was urgent while fuel was cheap and stable. It is now. The crude basket has moved from around $69 a barrel in February to peaks above $150, and diesel has seen its sharpest series of revisions in four years.
The instinct at this point is to chase a better rate. That is the wrong lever. Discounts do not address theft, they do not recover a wasted litre, and they do not tell you which vehicle is drinking more than it should.
What the sector actually needs is a system that ties the whole thing together, from how fuel is procured, to how it is used, to how it is paid for. Not three disconnected activities, but one end-to-end process. That is what Total Fuel Management means, and visibility is what makes it work. You cannot control what you cannot see, and you cannot improve what was never measured.
At Repos, we have watched fleets adopting this approach recover close to 10 per cent of their fuel spend, not through discounts, but by stopping what was already leaking.
For an industry carrying the country's growth on its axles, mileage and productivity are the whole business. Fuel deserves to be managed like a proper system.
Aditi Bhosale Walunj is the Founder at Repos Energy. Views expressed are the author's personal.