Road traffic accounts for about 60 percent of all freight movement in India and such delays, McKinsey estimates, inflate logistics costs to 13 percent of India’s gross domestic product. India has more than 650 interstate checkpoints, which studies say increase truck travel time by a quarter. The rollout of a nationwide goods and services tax (GST) from April was supposed to sweep away hundreds of checkposts on India’s state borders, paving the way for the seamless movement of goods from the tropical south to the Himalayas in the north.īut political opposition and the dilution of some of the tax’s key tenets mean hopes are fading that the checkposts will be demolished any time soon, a major blow for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reform agenda - and for India’s economy. “Officials at the checkpost are finicky.” “Our containers would get stuck for four to five days,” said Sundaram, who runs a firm with an annual turnover of $150 million.
WALAYAR/NEW DELHI, India, Sept 18 (Reuters) - At the Walayar checkpoint in southern India, lines of idle trucks stretch as far as the eye can see in both directions along the tree-lined interstate highway, waiting for clearance from tax inspectors that can take days to complete.ĭelays are so bad that textile entrepreneur D Bala Sundaram has stopped sending his trucks to the international container terminal at nearby Cochin, instead diverting them hundreds of kilometres to a smaller regional port and onwards via Sri Lanka.
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