A push to open up trade along the India-Pakistan border
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Pakistani trucks line up at the border crossing into India. They are allowed to drive over the border, but then must stop and have their goods transferred to Indian trucks. (Photos By Karin Brulliard)
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Pakistani porters unload boxes of tomatoes just arrived from India. Until 2007, they had to carry goods across the border on their heads.
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By Karin Brulliard
Sunday, February 20, 2011
IN LAHORE, PAKISTAN
Pakistan and India share language, culture, history and an 1,800-mile border; they are South Asia’s largest economies. What they barely share is trade - officially, at least, because of a quasi-blockade that dates from partition in 1947 and all but chokes off commerce under a dizzying web of rules.
The hurdles have spurred off-the-books trade, much of it shipped through third parties in such places as Dubai, where products are relabeled as imports from other lands - journeys that result in markups of 40 to 70 percent. Only recently did Pakistan make its first export to India by truck: a load of gypsum rock.
But economists, business groups and U.S. officials are pushing to loosen at least the most maddening restrictions, and they are hopeful that the two nations’ decision two weeks ago to resume peace talks might help. Free trade, they say, would benefit both India and Pakistan and might help to ease tensions whose gravity is reflected in rival nuclear arsenals.
“Economics 101 dictates that countries’ major trading partners should be their neighbors,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Washington-based Atlantic Council. “To change the dialogue from a zero-sum game to a positive, win-win outcome for both India and Pakistan, you need to start with the low-hanging fruit of opening trade and tourism.”
For a Pakistani economy in tatters, experts say, a freer flow of goods from India would allow cheaper access to products and raw materials, and could open up India, with its enormous population, to exports of Pakistan products such as cement.
Some research indicates that bilateral trade - now at about $2 billion a year, less than 1 percent of each country’s total trade - could swell to 20 to 50 times that under more liberal policies. Estimates of illicit trade range from $2 billion to $10 billion a year.
But for now, progress creeps. India admits all Pakistani products, but Pakistani firms complain that stringent standards and paperwork make many exports unviable. Pakistan allows a slowly expanding list of Indian products that now includes artificial kidneys, camphor, parachutes and 1,931 other items - but not Fair and Handsome cream, which is instead legally exported from Kolkata to landlocked Afghanistan, via the Pakistani port of Karachi, then smuggled back into Pakistan.
Travel restrictions are another barrier. Businessmen in both countries say they wait months for visas that allow travel only within major cities in the other country. That prevents visits to rural factories or farms, and business travelers are often tailed by intelligence agents.
Then there is the logistic muddle of land trade at the one border crossing, midway between Lahore and the Indian city of Amritsar. The twice daily cargo train involves an engine switch: A train carrying Pakistani exports, for example, must stop mere miles into India for the Pakistani engine and conductors to be replaced by Indian ones before continuing inland. With so few trains, exporters wait months for cargo space.
Trucks have only eight hours each day to cross, because each afternoon the two-lane road is overtaken by Indian and Pakistani border guards’ theatrical gate-closing ceremony. Even then, trucks must stop just past the frontier, where porters transfer the goods to local trucks. That is an advancement: Before 2007, trucks were barred from crossing at all, and laborers lugged cargo across the boundary on their heads.
smiley 
. but i was only thinking of the indo-pak truck drivers that represent something much bigger and i don’t want to see them harmed b/c some psychos love to see the constant tensions between the two countries.