Rewiring the Engine While It Runs: Technology and Process Reengineering in Indian Supply Chains

Abstract India's logistics cost stands at 13-14% of GDP against a global average of 8%. This gap persists despite substantial digital investment in supply chain infrastructure over the past decade. This article introduces the Supply Chain Digital Readiness Index (SDRI) — a first-order composite measure constructed from publicly available financial data across five Indian industry sectors for FY2025. The index reveals a 12-point spread between the highest and lowest-scoring sectors, driven not by differences in technology access but by accumulated process debt. The article argues that technology investment without parallel process reengineering produces operational underperformance, and uses verified sector-level data to demonstrate this across automotive, FMCG, pharmaceuticals, steel and metals, and textiles. 1. The Paradox India's logistics cost stands at roughly 13-14% of GDP. The global average is 8%. That six percentage-point gap translates into hundreds of billions of rupees in annual competitive disadvantage — and it persists despite nearly a decade of sustained digital investment in supply chain infrastructure. The paradox deserves attention. India has deployed GST, FASTag, the Unified Logistics Interface Platform (ULIP), and the Logistics Data Bank. It climbed six places to 38th in the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index in 2023 — a genuine improvement. Yet the efficiency gap with global peers has not closed at the pace that technology investment would suggest. Something else is at work. The answer, this article argues, is process debt. 2. What Process Debt Means Software engineers use the term "technical debt" to describe the accumulated cost of shortcuts taken during development — quick fixes that solve today's problem but create tomorrow's complexity. Ward Cunningham coined the concept in 1992. The logic is simple: every time you patch instead of redesign, you borrow against future productivity. The debt compounds. Supply chains carry an equivalent burden. Decades of manual approvals,