WOCULT

2:00 AM  ·  STATE HIGHWAY  ·  RAJASTHAN

It is 2 in the morning on a state highway in Rajasthan. A refrigerated truck is carrying vaccines and critical medication — an emergency replenishment order placed eight hours ago by a district hospital that ran short during a seasonal outbreak. The cold chain must hold between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. The cargo cannot be replaced within this window.

At the hospital, a pharmacist is awake. Three patients are waiting on medication that should have arrived yesterday. The duty doctor has delayed one procedure and told a family — who drove four hours through the night — that they need to wait a little longer. That family is sitting in a plastic chair in a corridor. They have been there since midnight.

The driver does not know any of this. He stopped once — at a roadside dhaba with no covered bay — left the engine running to hold the temperature, ate standing up in eleven minutes, and got back on the road. Not because a compliance module told him to. Because he understood what was riding on that cargo. The system tracking him had reduced him to a GPS coordinate and a temperature alert on a screen no one at the hospital will ever see.

3:40 AM  ·  NH-48  ·  DELHI–MUMBAI CORRIDOR

Four hundred kilometres north, a 65-foot car carrier is moving through the same darkness — ten brand-new sedans, two decks, fresh off an OEM plant in Haryana, bound for dealerships in Pune opening at nine. The driver has been at the wheel for eleven hours. In the control tower, he is a vehicle ID, a speed reading, and an ETA glowing amber. The regional sales manager is not thinking about him. The dealership principal refreshing the tracking app is not thinking about him. They are watching the dot on the map.

Inside that dot, a man is navigating a 65-foot rig through highway stretches that narrow without warning, past trucks parked dark on the shoulder, past cattle that appear in headlamps with no time to brake — carrying inventory worth over a crore under a JIT window with zero margin. The system says: on schedule. The system does not know what it is costing him to stay on schedule.

Two drivers. Two industries. One night. The system tracked both perfectly. It understood neither. That gap — between what we measure and what we owe — is the question I have spent nearly three decades trying to answer.  And on this same night, nearly 10 million truckers are on India's roads. More than a million of those drivers are living the same invisible story. We have built extraordinary systems to track them. We are yet to build the will to see them.

Why My Banner Does Not Say CIO of the Year

I have led digital transformation across four major logistics organisations worth billions. I built three technology platforms that received national recognition. I have more than 100+ CIO awards — including CIO of the Year for Transport and Logistics from CIO Klub and BSE in 2016, SCM Industry ICON in 2019, and the Oracle Unstoppable Leader award. My LinkedIn banner says none of this.

It says, Empowering a Sustainable Future. Leveraging Digital for a Humanity-First Corporate Culture. Contributing to a Healthier Universe.

The awards reflect what I delivered for organisations. The banner reflects what I believe the work is actually for. In an industry where the people doing the hardest work — the driver, the warehouse worker, the ground staff — are the last to be consulted when technology decisions are made, someone has to say plainly that the human being inside the system matters more than its performance metrics. I decided early that I would be that person. It has not always been comfortable. It has always been right.

What I Built That I Am Not Entirely at Peace With

When digital transformation arrives in logistics — IoT control towers, driver scoring, AI route optimisation — organisations plan for implementation risk. Timeline. Budget. Adoption. What they almost never plan for is identity risk. A driver who has navigated long-haul routes for fifteen years by instinct finds the system now knows the route better than he does. A dispatcher who managed forty vehicles through relationships and memory finds herself handling exception alerts on a dashboard. The knowledge that gave them standing is no longer the most valued thing in the room. That transition, without honesty, creates damage that no change management deck can fix.

I have deployed telematics systems that created exactly this. Data flowed only upward — to management, operations, HR, performance reviews. The driver never saw his own scores unless something went wrong. That system-built fear, not improvement. It extracted compliance, not trust. And I signed off on that architecture. It took me seeing what it did to people on the floor to understand the problem was never in the technology. It was in the direction the data was allowed to flow.

At a later organisation, I rebuilt that approach entirely. We gave drivers access to their own data first — fuel efficiency, safety scores, route adherence — visible to them before any manager. Coaching conversations replaced disciplinary ones. Accident rates dropped measurably within eighteen months. The technology was identical. The intent behind it was different.

I have been in rooms where senior leaders discussed on-time delivery performance for an entire quarter without once saying the word fatigue. I sat in those rooms. Sometimes I spoke. Sometimes, to my regret, I did not speak loudly enough.

The CIO in a logistics organisation carries a specific obligation: to be the first person who knows what a deployment will do to the people inside it — and to say so plainly, before go-live, not in the post-mortem. I have held that line. I have also failed to hold it when the pressure in the room was too great. Both are true. I write about this because our industry needs technology leaders willing to say both are true — not only publish the success stories.

I still spend nearly 20% of my time on the floor, in truck depots, in conversations that are not in any agenda. What that produces — the trust, the early warning that a system is being gamed before it fails — no dashboard has ever produced for me. The ROI on human presence is not a line in any budget. It is the reason the expensive deployments do not fail.

What India Is Not Talking About

I have led technology strategy across 250+ logistics cell of manufacturing units in 40+ countries. At that scale, the temptation is standardisation — same system, same configuration everywhere. What I learned, painfully in some geographies, is that deployments which listened first always landed better. The ones that arrived with the answer already packaged left workarounds that persisted for years and people who stopped believing the technology was built for them.

India has this problem at a national scale. Logistics contributes over 14% to our GDP and runs on the backs of nearly 10 million truck drivers. And yet the digital transformation conversation in India — in boardrooms, in startup ecosystems, in policy corridors — is almost entirely about fintech, SaaS, and consumer applications. The cost of that blind spot is paid on highways every night: in cold chains that break at the last mile, in port operations still running on manual documentation, in drivers whose fatigue data does not exist because the system was built to track the cargo, not the person carrying it.

Logistics technology is not a back-office problem. The data flowing through a logistics operation — shipment patterns, demand signals, cold chain exceptions, last-mile behaviour — is some of the richest operational intelligence available to any business. Most organisations are sitting on it without reading it. I write about this every fortnight in my newsletter, Logistics Technology Insights, to nearly 30K+ readers who understand exactly what I am describing. The gap is not in awareness at the operational level. It is in whether India's business leadership is willing to treat logistics as the strategic national asset it actually is.

What AI Must Not Be Allowed to Repeat

AI is arriving in logistics — route optimisation, demand forecasting, autonomous vehicles, drone delivery. I am not afraid of it. Drivers learned GPS when we said they could not. Dispatchers mastered platforms we said were too complex. Warehouse workers absorbed robotics and voice-pick without the training budgets they deserved. This industry has absorbed enormous change. It will absorb AI.

What it cannot absorb with dignity intact is pace without conscience. AI deployed to compress workforces faster than any human being can be retrained or honestly spoken to is not transformation — it is extraction dressed in the language of innovation. The technology leader's responsibility right now is simple: slow down the deployment conversation long enough to ask what our plan is for the people whose job the algorithm is about to do better. Not as a PR exercise. As an obligation we carry before go-live, not after.

Practically, a healthier universe means two things running in parallel. Every route I have optimised has saved fuel. Every IoT sensor has reduced emissions. Every load consolidation has removed trucks from roads. Real numbers, every one of them. But a healthier universe also means the driver in Rajasthan has a proper rest stop — not a dhaba shoulder with the engine running. It means the family in that hospital corridor can trust that the supply chain serving their loved one was designed with a human being at its centre.

Saving kilometres and saving people must run together. One without the other is not transformation. It is extraction with better branding.

What the Floor Taught Me That Nothing Else Could

If I could give one piece of advice to a young technology leader entering logistics today, it would be this: go to the floor before you go to the boardroom. And keep going back.

Everything I know that actually matters, I learned on the floor. A warehouse supervisor in a cold-chain facility who had been running the same section for eleven years and held knowledge that no requirements document had ever captured. A driver in Rajasthan who told me in fifteen minutes exactly why our route optimisation app was unusable in practice — and was completely right. A billing executive whose workarounds were so elegant that when we finally studied them, we redesigned the entire module around her logic. These people are not obstacles to transformation. They are its most important raw material.

Nearly three decades since 1999 — from writing the first software at Safexpress, to building one of India's first end-to-end digital logistics platforms at Flywheel, to leading technology across India, Qatar/Dubai, and other countries, to building the Code-M platform at Movers International Group for the Global market today — one belief has not moved. The road that never sleeps is run by people whose names the control room does not always know. They deserve technology built with full awareness of what they give. Not systems that extract more. Systems that, for the first time, give something genuinely back.

The road that never sleeps is run by people the control room does not always know by name. Nearly three decades of building around them has left me with one conviction that has never shifted: they deserved better systems from the beginning. We still have time to build them.

--Ends--

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Harvinder Singh Banga has spent nearly three decades at the intersection of technology and logistics — not just in strategy decks, but majorly on floors, in control rooms, in truck depots at odd hours, and in the conversations that happen when a system fails and the humans inside it have to hold things together.

He has held CIO & CTO roles at CJ Darcl Logistics, Mahindra Logistics, Samvardhana Motherson Group, Gulf Warehousing Corporation Qatar, JMBaxi Group, and Flywheel Logistics — where he was part of the founding team that built one of India's first end-to-end digital logistics platforms. Today he is Group Chief Digital Officer at Movers International Group, building the Code-M platform for international markets.

CIO of the Year, Transport & Logistics — CIO Klub & BSE, 2016. Oracle Unstoppable Leader. Author of Logistics Technology Insights, read by nearly 8000 professionals across India & other countries. 

A Sikh whose faith grounds everything he builds. A photographer who documents what corporate narratives miss. A traveller. A LinkedIn author. And a leader who has held one belief since 1999, through every system he has built and every floor he has stood on: the person at the centre of every supply chain matters more than the platform surrounding them.