On a weekday afternoon in South Delhi, a Shadowfax delivery rider eased his motorcycle into a housing society for a routine return pickup. The customer wasn’t home. “No problem, ma’am,” he said over the phone. “I can come tomorrow. Our hub is around.”

This being “around” is a business model. In Indian logistics, speed doesn’t come from technology so much as geography: a sprawl of warehouses, parcel-sorting centresOrders move through a layered network: parcels are first collected from sellers and funnelled into large sorting hubs; they........

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