On a rainy July evening in the busy and sprawling Surat Textile Market, Rangnath Sarda received a call from a client, a distributor in Tamil Nadu, to discuss billing details under the new GST regime. Since Sarda did not have a Goods and Services Tax (GST) number, his client would have to figure out how to bill him, transport the goods and pay agents’ commissions.
Business owners across thousands of Surat’s small-scale trading, weaving and dyeing units, which together churn out around 40 million metres of fabric each day, were asking and answering similar questions up and down their