Did GST really create “one nation, one market”?

Before 2017, a truck driving from Gurugram to Chennai could expect to stop a dozen times. At each state border it joined a queue at a check-post while officials inspected papers and levied entry taxes, octroi, and assorted local duties. By the government’s own account, trucks spent roughly a fifth of their running time idling at these inter-state barriers, and a large part of a typical journey was spent at check-points and official stoppages rather than driving (Business Standard). India was a single country with internal customs posts.

GST’s promise was to tear those down. By folding state and local levies into a single tax and treating the whole country as a single taxable market, it removed the fiscal incentive to stop a truck at a state line. The check-posts came down at more than 20 borders, and the effect on the road was immediate: trucks that once managed about 225 kilometres a day began covering 300 or more, close to a third further, simply because they stopped waiting. For a logistics-heavy economy, that is a large productivity gain.

But “one market” was a strong claim. The physical check-post was replaced by a digital one, the “e-way bill,” an electronic permit a transporter must generate for any consignment over ₹50,000, valid for a set number of days by distance. It moves the friction online rather than removing it, and a truck can still be stopped and detained over an e-way bill that does not match its cargo (LiveLaw). A firm operating across states must also register and file separately in each, so the paperwork of crossing a border has not vanished entirely.

And GST unified only the part of the market it actually covers. Petrol, diesel, and electricity sit outside it, so their taxes still vary state to state (see “Why are petrol, power and property still outside GST?”). Whole stretches of the economy, farm produce moving through state-controlled mandis, real estate, liquor, run on their own local rules. The single market is real for the goods inside GST, and patchy beyond them.

What GST built is not quite the seamless market of the slogan, but it is far closer than what came before. The trucks really do move faster. GST dissolved the tax borders inside India while leaving a thinner set of administrative and sectoral ones standing: a single market in the making rather than a finished one.