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India’s trade story hidden in e-way bills. Gujarat and Bihar are mirror images

Every month, 9 crore digital documents capture how goods move across India. We finally read them.

Ask any economist what India exported to Malaysia last quarter and you’ll get a precise answer within minutes. Ask what Maharashtra exported to Uttar Pradesh, and the national statistical system offers almost nothing. Seven decades after Independence, the flows of goods between India’s states remain among the most consequential but the least-measured dimensions of the national economy.

That gap may now have a remedy. In April 2018, the GST rollout mandated the e-way bill: a digital compliance document required every time goods worth more than Rs 50,000 cross a state boundary or travel a specified distance within a state. Today, around 9 crore such records are generated every month, each capturing the origin, destination, declared value, and commodity classification of a consignment. The Center of Data for Economic Decision-making (CoDED) attempted to repurpose these compliance records as a high-frequency measure of India’s internal trade. To our knowledge, it’s the first systematic attempt to do so.

Using publicly available monthly e-way bill statistics for all states from 2018-19 to 2024-25, we constructed three trade flow measures per state: intra-state trade, inter-state outward trade (the state’s “exports” to other states), and inter-state inward trade (its “imports”). We normalised each by the Gross State Domestic Product (the same trade-to-GDP ratio international economists use) to produce figures comparable across states of vastly different sizes.

The aggregate picture offers important reassurance: every state in the dataset shows a sharp contraction in at least one trade flow around 2020. The Covid-19 shock is clearly legible in the series, confirming that e-way bills respond to real economic disruptions. The RBI’s........

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