NEW DELHI: Two days into a 21-day lockdown, India’s hugely disrupted supply chain for essential commodities struggled to get going in the face of a fresh set of challenges — truckers abandoning vehicles on highways, manufacturers running out of inventory and delivery agents of e-tailers refusing to venture out for fear of police harassment — even as state governments and local authorities appeared to remove some of the roadblocks that had stalled the distribution network on the first day.Transporters’ associations and members of the Agriculture Produce Market Committee said the Centre's decision to exempt goods trucks from highway toll had made little difference because drivers and helpers had started abandoning stranded vehicles in anticipation of a prolonged logjam.With trucks unable to reach their destinations, wholesale markets have been hit by a shortage of agricultural produce. “Drivers have started abandoning trucks and hiking back home, even if these places are 200-300km from where they are. We request the Centre to urgently ask the states, particularly collectors, to supply food and water to our stranded drivers,” Bal Malkit Singh, chairman of the All India Motor Transport Congress, said.“We are also under lockdown, otherwise we’d be making arrangements for our drivers.” The All India Transport Welfare Association estimates that about 30 lakh trucks are stuck on highways. In the FMCG sector, Britannia CEO Varun Berry flagged the risk of the packaged food industry run ning out of stocks in a week to 10 days if the supply chain wasn’t normalised immediately.“The food industry supply chain is disaggregated and dependent on interstate movement of goods. Due to the nature of the materials, inventories across the chain are low. If even one link in the supply chain is broken, the country could run out of stocks of packaged food in the next 710 days,” he said.Many staples have already vanished from the shelves of supermarkets and local kirana stores. The movement of raw materials has been curtailed too, forcing firms like Britannia, Parle and Unibic to cut production. Britannia CEO Varun Berry’s remarks have been one of the strongest by an FMCG firm. Parle had expressed concerns, and Metro Cash & Carry India had said it was unable to open its wholesale stores because of police threatening its employees.Biscuit maker Unibic, whose sole factory on the outskirts of Bengaluru has been shut since Sunday, has been facing problems in transporting raw material such as palm oil, flavours and cashew nuts for its cookies. In Assam and some other states, many migrant vegetable vendors have returned home as it is unprofitable to set up shop when there's a severe shortage of produce and no capital to buy what's available. Prem Chandra Shah, a wholesale vendor in Guwahati, returned to Bihar on Thursday.“First there was disruption due to anti-CAA/NRC protests and now due to coronavirus . Too many losses in a short span of time,” he said. V R Soundarajan, president of the Koyambedu Wholesale Traders' Association in Chennai, told TOI that about 350 trucks arrive from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala on a normal day. “Today, only 150 trucks came; everywhere we are hearing stories of vehicles being stopped at state entry points. About Rs 1.2 crore worth of flowers from Karnataka were dumped today on the Bengaluru-Chennai highway With vegetables, we can't even quantify the loss,” he said. The Centre is setting up acontrol room and coordinating with states for entry of vehicles, sources said.A taskforce has been set up to work with state governments on faster issuance of passes inside city limits, and for speedy entry of vehicles through inter-state borders. For e-comm players like Amazon, Flipkart, BigBasket, Grofers, Swiggy and Zomato, getting curfew passes to resume operations is no longer the only challenge. While the police authorities in metros like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru have assured them of curfew passes, these companies are now facing issues in taking new orders and fulfilling the existing backlog. (Contributions by Rachel Chitra, Digbijay Mishra, Madhav Chanchani, Avik Das in Bengaluru & Pankhuri Yadav & Paras Singh in Delhi)