With the voluntary e-way bill mechanism getting underway and several States readying for roll out of e-way bill for intra-State movement, industry players say they expect initial teething challenges as faced during the GST roll-out.

E-way bills are electronic data of receipts generated during transactions between buyers and sellers that involve transporters. They are aimed at doing away with physical checking by State government officials, with an aim to improve efficiency in movement and widen tax revenue by preventing possible underinvoicing.

Voluntary trials for e-way bills started from mid-January this year. From February 1, trials for e-way bills for goods moving within a State are expected to start. E-way bills are supposed to be implemented by not later than June 1, as per the GST Council.

“It is too early to comment on how the e-way bill trials are functioning... Moreover, intra-State filings will start from February 1. I am sure, like GST, there will be teething problems,” R Dinesh, MD, TVS Logistics, who also heads CII Institute of Logistics, told BusinessLine recently.

Interestingly, SP Singh, Senior Fellow, Indian Foundation of Transport Research and Training, said that transporters are trying to keep the consignment value below ₹50,000 as much as possible as GST would entail checking of consignments above that value.

Reports say that some States such as Maharashtra after implementing the intra-state e-way bill, have decided to postpone the date to June 1. There are also reports of States relaxing intra-State GST filing for specific goods.

Subhasish Das, Co-founder and CEO of Trukky, an online vehicle aggregator, maintained that e-way bill simplifies the documentation process which earlier was very complicated and had different State-wise requirements.

To ease implemtation of e-way bills, also under discussion is a proposal to have the invoice number or e-way bill number, generated on the portal or physically mapped to a RFID tag embedded on the device on the vehicle.