In the first budget presented by the United Progressive Alliance, in July 2004, the former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said that among the major priorities of the new government was ensuring that India became a genuine single market. The various restrictions, he pointed out, had “outlived their utility”. The strike called by the various truck drivers’ and owners’ unions that owe their allegiance to the All India Motor Transport Congress begun on Monday is in response to a mix of issues, some forward- and some backward-looking; but much of their complaint is due to the fact that India is not yet, the government’s whole term later, a real single market.

Of course, strikes of this nature are always problematic: the AIMTC has called for strikes practically every year since 1999 — last year too the issues included service taxes, highway tolls, and the price of diesel. Only the first makes sense. The artificially low price of diesel already weighs down the government’s bottomline; at this time of international price volatility, we need to seriously consider replacing government-set rates with a flexible price system, instead of cutting it a further ten rupees, as the truckers demand. Highway tolls, meanwhile, are an essential component of the modernisation of our transport system; truckers have seen their costs reduced because of new highways, and continued efficiency requires the payment of tolls. Further, striking just when a struggling economy needs inflation kept at its current thankfully low late is particularly problematic.

That being said, rationalising service taxes makes sense. So does streamlining the absurdly long queues at state border crossings — lines due to non-harmonised state taxation and paranoid bureaucracies. Here’s what a single market is capable of doing: rationalising decisions down the line, for producers, consumers, and, yes, those who serve as essential intermediaries — such as truckers. Individual producers will merely have to keep track of a single number, the local price for their produce. Wholesale consumers will find their processes simplified, and retail consumers will see prices fall. And truckers will stop having to plan their journeys around absurd and incoherent “permit” rules. The rationalisation of sales tax, too, will mean that smaller companies will gain greater flexibility: after the last strike, the government finally relaxed its paperwork requirements enough so that the licence number of a particular truck didn’t have to be put on every consignment note, even for tiny consignments. This kind of change should occur within government; it shouldn’t require an ill-advised and ill-timed strike.