This concept revolves around a simple vehicle tracking device (which needs to be mandatory for all freight vehicles) and a transponder (RFID based token system). The vehicle tracking system can be used to get data about the vehicle’s position on a satellite map (preferably ISRO based imaging and tracking @NAVIK :) ). The transponder can talk to road side infrastructure (reader on an electric pole) or a dial in mechanism (over SIM card through GSM/CDMA) to identify the goods manifest being transported between any two points at any time.
The access to goods manifest will allow real-time access based tracking of the contents of the vehicle’s freight. This will allow for a lot of data entry jobs for locals for manifest entry. This will also allow for a lot of embedded systems to be placed and developed, both for road-side infrastructure and hand held systems that will talk to a central cloud repository. Intra-vehicle data gathering can be achieved with Bluetooth Low Energy kind of tags for example that are minuscule in size and last days for data polling.
The data storage on the cloud will be redundant and restricted access will ensure that the data entry operators can only access manifest data that is local to them. The data can be taken off or written to the transponder at every transit point for the goods. Law enforcement officers/legal port authorities can be given special privileges to access manifests in a non-local manner. This will help trafficking of goods difficult and will ensure a simple system in effect for the freight company which can only load and unload goods at a known freight port. This is kind of like a shipping system only on land.
The roll-out of GST or any other state wide documentation can be electronically added to the manifest. This will allow for the manifest to support all necessary data for billing and tax extraction per shipment. The proof of payments can be allowed to be part of the manifest so that there is no need for octroi etc. to be in cash and so misuse of the system. The taxes can be deducted and fed into a central repository at all toll points so there is really no need for the vehicle to stop for checking and taxation.
The future of this concept can be extended to allow for transport companies to bid for a particular shipment online and the best prices can be given to the person or firm wishing to transport the goods.
This algorithm can be applied to check how many AADHAR holders live in a particular area and then to check how much resource is used for that particular area. From Water, Electricity theft all the way to farmer vegetable prices can be locked onto in one sweep :) We will learn to understand from the AI that we can actually measure the wastage of resource or over use of it anywhere in the country. Also we can create jobs where senior citizens no longer need to visit the bank...the bank can go them through portable AADHAR based banking...just thinking :)