This is the story of two friends and India air freight forwarding yesterday and today.
      Perhaps, sharing a first name that started with ‘J’—one Jehangir and the other Jamshed—brought them close.
      Growing up together in Mumbai, both dreamed big.
      The first was Jehangir, later simply known as JRD Tata (Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata), and the second was Jamshed Guzder.
      Tata flew the first commercial flight of Tata Aviation on October 15, 1932, when he boarded a second-hand Puss Moth at Karachi (now in Pakistan) for the flight to Bombay (now Mumbai).
      Incidentally, he had 45 pounds of mail on board.
      Tata is remembered—and revered even today—for starting Air India.
      The history of freight forwarding in India is inextricably linked to JRD.
      That first flight made history in quite a few ways.
      JRD wanted to show the feasibility of airmail from London to India. Karachi at that time was where Imperial Airways (today’s British Airways) service started for London.
      Soon after landing in Bombay, JRD handed over the flight to his business partner, the South African-born Nevill Vintcent, who flew all the way to Madras (now Chennai). From there the flight took off for its return journey to Karachi so that the mail could be loaded on the Imperial Airways flight to the UK.

The Second “J”

      But the second friend, Jamshed Guzder, (left) was in a slightly different business: moving goods.
      Jamshed had inherited AFL, one of the top freight forwarders of India.
      Long before India achieved independence in 1947, Guzder began his business as a service provider for the British Army.
      He moved army material that came to India through Bombay.
      The company was involved in handling imported cargo along with project and plant-related transportation.
      Later, the company started moving machinery for steel and power plants and irrigation projects.

Jamshed & JRD

      With the coming independence, Jamshed Guzder knew there would be rapid industrialization and he decided to tweak the business.
      The tweaking was at the prompting of his good friend, Jehangir Tata.
      JRD told Guzder in no uncertain terms to get into a new business: aviation!
      For AFL, which had been moving sea freight for more than 80 years, it was a tall order. But in reality Guzder was a keen aviator. After seeing the fleets of DC-3 and American Liberators that had been abandoned by the British and US Air Forces at the end of World War II, both friends were hooked.

Airline & Forwarder

      When JRD started Tata Airlines (later to become Air India), he asked his friend Jamshed to handle the passengers and freight of the new airline.
      Guzder’s AFL was appointed as the carrier’s first sole cargo agent in the country in 1945. When Jamshed Guzder’s son, Cyrus Guzder, (now Chairman and Managing Director) (right) joined the company in 1968, he brought in big changes.
      While AFL handled ground operations for almost all the carriers touching Mumbai, he saw an opportunity in small package couriers. In 1978, he joined hands with DHL.
      Since then, the company has moved into other businesses.

India's Legacy Forwarders

      Like Cyrus Guzder, there are quite a few freight forwarders serving India who have been around for well over a hundred years. Tushar Jani, for example, has a 130-year old history.
      Founder of Blue Dart, South Asia’s top courier and integrated express package distribution company, he was virtually pushed into the freight forwarding business in 1978 when his father passed away.
      That business had been started by his great grandfather and today has seen four generations: Tushar Jani’s daughter Bhairavi Jani set up i3pl to provide end-to-end logistics services to corporate clients and directs the SCA Group with its four verticals: warehousing, supply chain technology, cargo handling and freight forwarding, and shipping, respectively.

Bhairavi Jani and Tushar Jani, carrying on a four-generation tradition in logistics.

Natural Evolution

      The freight forwarding business, said Tushar Jani, has evolved over the years.
      “In the early 1940s or early 1950s, there were no freight forwarders in this country,” he recalled.
      “There were Mukaddams and Dalals (or middlemen).
      “These Dalals were people who processed documents in Custom House.
      “The Mukaddam represented those people who brought the cargo from the customer’s warehouse or factory to the port, completed the other formalities, and loaded cargo on to a ship.
      “He ensured the loading on the ship and then went to the shipping line to take a bill of lading and give it to the shipper.”
      “There was a third entity there: the freight broker.
      “His job was to book space on behalf of the exporter on the ship and for this he got two percent brokerage from the shipping line. This freight broker was born out of a necessity.
      “The Dalal and the Mukaddam were Indians and could not speak English—an essential during British rule.
      “So they needed somebody who could converse in English and that is how the broker came into the picture.”

Documenting Shipments

      “As for documents during the early years,” Jani said, “there was only the Bill of Lading given by the shipping line.”
      It was around 1962 that the Indian Customs merged both these entities—the Freight Broker and the Dalal/Mukaddam—into one: The Custom House Agent.
      “Somewhere down the line around 1976-78, the shipping lines started recognizing these custom house agents as freight forwarders and started taking bookings directly from them.
      “They became forwarders.”

Modern India Air Cargo

      Modern air cargo started around 1965 and IATA came in the picture.
      But only Mumbai (Bombay) had any kind of air cargo facilities.
      In those early days, there were only a few IATA agents.
      “These agents used to bring cargo to Ballard Estate, and from there the airline would truck it down to Santa Cruz airport.
      “That was when the air freight forwarder was born,” remembered Jani.
      He still remembers the day in 1978 when the last of the 12 freighter charters departed to Hungary.
      Working conditions at that point were not good.
      “When the containers came in, nobody knew how to take the container to the factory.
      “This was in 1978. People were taking cargo to the port and stuffing it in the container there.
      “Then someone got the bright idea that it was okay to take a container to the factory. Somewhere in the early 80s, the containers started going to the factories.
      “While that has changed, such a move has not taken place in air cargo.
      “Over the years, Mumbai lost its place as the only airport for cargo.
      “As the number of airports went up so did the freight forwarders.
      “With government measures in place, the business has moved ahead.”

Tanna Chimes In

      Keshav Tanna, who also serves as a vice president of FIATA, has been associated with the freight forwarding industry for well over 30 years. He believes that when the government opened up the freight forwarding Industry for 100 percent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), “our Industry had undergone a sea change.”
      “There was a huge influx of multinational forwarders that came into India to set up shop.
      “Gone were the days of being merely a Mukaddam,” Tanna said.
      “Now, the local freight forwarder had to gear up to provide international quality service levels.”
      Tanna, along with many others, said that providing world-class service was a challenge, but it was easier to deal with than the bigger issue—trying to keep pace with the investments the multinational forwarders were making in the Industry.
      Mr. Tanna agrees that the credit policies and business models adopted by these multinational forwarders were impossible to keep pace with, but over the years home-grown forwarders have geared up dramatically and are now able to provide similar global services: door to door deliveries, 3PL/4PL logistics, consolidations, inventory management, and state-of-the-art warehousing facilities.
      “Other than that,” Tanna said, “online customs documentation was unheard of 30 years ago when I started my career; one had to run helter-skelter for signatures and authorizations of various customs officials… But now, we don’t,” he said.
Tirthankar Ghosh