NEW DELHI: The country loses Rs 60,000 crore a year due to congestion (including fuel wastage), slow speed of freight vehicles and waiting time at toll plazas and checking points, a study on operational efficiencies of freight transportation by roads has claimed.It said vehicles crawl at an average speed of less than 20 kmph on some key corridors such as Mumbai-Chennai, Delhi-Chennai and Delhi-Guwahati while it's only 21.35 kmph on Delhi-Mumbai stretch.The Transport Corporation of India and IIM (Calcutta) study said while India's freight volume was increasing at a compounded annual growth rate of 9.08% and vehicles were growing at 10.76%, the road length was increasing at only 4.01%. This has resulted paucity of road space to accommodate vehicles and to increase the speed.The report blamed waiting time at toll plazas as one of the main reasons for long travel time of freight vehicles on highways it surveyed. The Delhi-Mumbai route has 18 stops and the average stoppage delay is three hours, which is 3% of the total travel time. Toll stoppages account for almost 7% of the stoppage delay on an average. The findings are no different on the Delhi-Bangalore stretch.The study covered 17 major routes and found that national average of fuel mileage is only 3.96 km per litre. While it's maximum on Chennai-Kolkata corridor, it's the least at 3.44 km on the Delhi-Nagpur stretch.In an interesting observation, the report said that while average stoppage delay had reduced in 2011-12 compared to 2008-09, average speed had also slowed down. Truckers said this could be due to ongoing expansion of highways. During widening of NHs, the available road space gets reduced and vehicles take several diversions.S P Singh, a senior fellow with Indian Foundation of Transport Research and Training, said truckers and logistic firms should not single out delays at toll plazas and road condition as the reasons for slow truck movement. "You have overloaded trucks and fatigued drivers since transporters often deploy only one driver per truck against the norm of two drivers on a long trip. All these result in reduced average speed. So, transporters and logistic companies cannot pass their own failures on to the road network and toll plazas," he said.At the same time, the efficiency of trucks had improved because of better road network. At present, trucks in India cover at least 325-350 km per day compared to only 250 km in 1998 before the massive NH development work started by the then NDA government. "But we need to come close to covering 500 km per day, something that some of the BRICS countries have achieved," Singh said.