DPIIT releases LEADS 2025 with a four-tier ranking

The seventh edition of the Centre's state logistics scorecard moves from three grades to four, with Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Mizoram and Delhi heading their groups.

What happened

• On 13 May 2026 the Commerce & Industry Minister released the LEADS 2025 report and felicitated the winners of the LEAPS 2025 Awards, both administered by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT).
• This is the seventh edition of LEADS — Logistics Ease Across Different States — DPIIT's annual assessment of logistics performance across States and Union Territories.
• The headline change is structural: LEADS 2025 replaces the earlier three-tier classification with a four-tier framework — Exemplars, High Performers, Accelerators and Growth-Seekers.
• States are not ranked against each other on a single national list. They are grouped within four peer categories — Coastal, Landlocked, North-Eastern, and Union Territory — so that comparison is among structurally similar geographies.
• The top "Exemplars" in each peer group are Tamil Nadu (coastal), Uttar Pradesh (landlocked), Mizoram (North-Eastern) and Delhi (UT).
• The release also carried the LEAPS Awards across 13 categories, and was framed by the wider trade context the Minister set out — record exports of USD 863 billion and an aspirational USD 1 trillion export target.

Background & context

LEADS began in 2018 as an attempt to do for logistics what the Ease of Doing Business rankings did for the regulatory environment — turn an abstract performance gap into a comparable, published scorecard that nudges States to compete. The earliest editions leaned heavily on a perception survey of logistics users and stakeholders. Over successive years the methodology was rebalanced so that hard, measurable indicators carry most of the weight; in the 2025 edition roughly 59% weightage is given to objective indicators rather than perception alone, which is the direction of travel DPIIT has signalled across recent editions.

LEADS does not sit in isolation. It is the measurement arm of a larger policy architecture for logistics that the government built up over the last few years. The National Logistics Policy (NLP), launched in 2022, set the goal of lowering India's logistics cost as a share of GDP and improving its standing on global logistics-performance measures. The PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan, launched in 2021, is the digital, GIS-based platform that integrates infrastructure planning across ministries — roads, railways, ports, airports, warehousing and utilities — onto one map so that projects are planned together rather than in silos. LEADS is explicitly aligned to both PM Gati Shakti and the National Logistics Policy: it is the yardstick that tells the Centre and the States whether the plumbing those two initiatives are laying down is actually translating into smoother, cheaper movement of goods on the ground.

The administering chain is worth fixing clearly. LEADS is produced by DPIIT, which sits under the Ministry of Commerce & Industry. DPIIT is the same department that houses the Logistics division, runs the PM Gati Shakti initiative on the logistics side, and earlier piloted the National Single Window System for clearances. So the body that writes the policy, the body that runs the integrated-planning platform, and the body that publishes the report card are one and the same — which is why LEADS functions as a self-assessment-and-nudge tool rather than as an external audit.

For Prelims

• Full form: LEADS = Logistics Ease Across Different States. The award is LEAPS = Logistics Excellence, Advancement and Performance Shield.
• Publishing body: Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce & Industry. (source-anchored)
• Edition & year: 7th edition, LEADS 2025, released 13 May 2026. (source-anchored)
• What it measures: logistics performance of States and Union Territories, with ~59% weightage to objective indicators. (source-anchored)
• The four tiers (new this year): Exemplars → High Performers → Accelerators → Growth-Seekers, replacing the earlier three-tier grading. (source-anchored)
• The four peer groups: Coastal, Landlocked, North-Eastern, and Union Territory — states are graded within their own geography, not on one common list. (source-anchored)
• Exemplars 2025: Coastal — Tamil Nadu; Landlocked — Uttar Pradesh; North-Eastern — Mizoram; UT — Delhi. (source-anchored)
• High Performers: Coastal — Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra; Landlocked — Haryana, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Bihar; NE — Tripura, Meghalaya; UT — Jammu & Kashmir, Puducherry. (source-anchored)
• Policy alignment: built to track PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan (2021) and the National Logistics Policy (2022). (source-anchored, with year added)
• LEAPS Awards 2025: 4th edition, 13 categories spanning Core Logistics, MSMEs, Startups, Institutions and Special Categories. (source-anchored)

For the "how many / match the pairs" pattern, the full peer-group set is the thing to carry. The four geographies are Coastal, Landlocked, North-Eastern and Union Territory; the four performance tiers are Exemplars, High Performers, Accelerators and Growth-Seekers. The full Exemplar pairing is the most quotable: Tamil Nadu – Coastal, Uttar Pradesh – Landlocked, Mizoram – North-Eastern, Delhi – UT. Among the lower tiers named in the release, the Accelerators include states such as Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Goa and Karnataka (Coastal); Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand (Landlocked); Nagaland, Assam and Manipur (NE); and Chandigarh, Ladakh and Lakshadweep (UTs). The Growth-Seekers — the lowest tier this year — include West Bengal (Coastal), Rajasthan (Landlocked), Sikkim (NE) and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands (UT).

One related domestic index to hold alongside LEADS is the Logistics Cost Framework / Time-Release Study work that the same logistics ecosystem feeds into, and at the State level the broader family of DPIIT-published competitive rankings such as the State Business Reform Action Plan rankings. The single most useful comparison, though, remains the World Bank LPI: LEADS measures within India and rewards reform momentum (which is why a "catching-up" tier like Accelerators exists), whereas the LPI benchmarks India against other countries on customs, infrastructure, shipment timeliness and tracking.

Why it matters

Logistics cost in India has historically been estimated as a high share of GDP relative to advanced economies, and that gap is a direct tax on the competitiveness of every exporter and manufacturer. The problem LEADS addresses is informational and political at once: without a published, comparable scorecard, a State has little external pressure to fix the slow port gate, the missing warehouse, or the truck that idles at a check-post. By grading States within peer groups, LEADS removes the easy excuse that a landlocked or North-Eastern State cannot be compared with a coastal one — it forces each State to look at the best performer in its own category. The shift to four tiers this year sharpens that signal: a dedicated Growth-Seekers tier names the laggards plainly, while Accelerators rewards States showing reform momentum even if they are not yet at the top.

The release also tied logistics performance to the macro story the Minister set out: India recorded all-time-high exports of USD 863 billion in the financial year ending 31 March 2026, with services exports growing around 8.5–9%, and has set an aspirational USD 1 trillion export target. Cheaper, faster internal logistics is one of the levers that has to move for that target to be credible — exports cannot scale if goods cannot reach ports affordably. The same speech noted that India's free-trade agreements, together with arrangements involving Japan, Korea and ASEAN, now cover more than two-thirds of global trade, which raises the premium on getting domestic logistics right so that improved market access actually converts into shipments.

For Mains

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