The future of seamless trade begins with reimagining bills of lading

The establishment of the Bills of Lading Bill, 2025, has given India the legal foundation for digital-first documentation in world trade. While this does work as an enabling step, the actual momentum from the bill depends on technology players integrating it into working infrastructure that makes trade easier for exporters and other stakeholders.

This could be an incremental shift as far as export processing, exchange of documentation, and payment systems are concerned. Most interestingly, emerging startups are taking the lead on this shift to digital trade, rather than traditional frontline institutions. 

The bottleneck behind the border

The core of international trade is that old-world trade documents—especially the bill of lading—are handled under an incredibly manual process. Once a trade occurs, the bill of lading acts as proof of ownership, triggers payments to the sellers, and allows for customs clearance. Yet to this day, the bill of lading is still being transmitted via emails, scanned copies, or courier services from one party to another.

Such antiquated means generate friction, resulting in common delays, manual errors, and, in many cases, reconciliations being kept on hold pending documentary proof and verification, which can take 10 to 15 days per shipment. For exporters from India, especially MSMEs, such delays imply higher working capital requirements and lower competitiveness.

Tokenisation: A possible fix

Generation of an alternate novelty involves tokenising presentations. Tokenising a freight document is essentially a digitally signed document that verifies the original and stores it on a secure blockchain network. This treatment ensures the real-time transfer of title when interfacing with carriers, banks, insurers, customs, and logistics platforms in a tamper-proof manner.

Putting aside digitisation itself, the greatest advantage of tokenisation lies in making trade flows programmable. When a critical trade document can be made machine-readable and enforceable by a smart contract, many friction points in the export process could potentially be removed. For instance, payment release or customs clearance could become an automatic trigger once the goods are received at the port, eliminating the need for additional interventions.

The startups that are attempting this model are already publishing live pilots. Early results show a significant improvement in processing times, with some document procedures that previously took over a week now closing within 48 hours. The results are not just about efficiencies; they could make a significant impact in terms of Indian businesses participating in global markets.

Also Read

How UP is redefining India’s export story, one craft at a time

Startups are tackling what larger systems couldn’t

Several global initiatives are trying to streamline trade documentation, each amid a standstill in progress. Meanwhile, startups are addressing the problem with immense flexibility. Many are rethinking the entire flow of cross-border trade using open APIs, distributed ledgers, and scalable digital identity systems, starting from document issuance and validation through to the end.

Interoperability of these innovations with national platforms such as ICEGATE, PCS 1x, and even with global shipping consortia is important, and therefore, they aren't built in isolation. Some also conform to international frameworks like the UNCITRAL MLETR and ICC DSI initiative so that their tools will have legal validity across jurisdictions.

What sets these apart is the focus on user interface and real-time actability. Although exporters may not recognise blockchain, they are expected to benefit from faster settlement, clearer ownership rights, and fewer manual handoffs. The startups building these solutions indeed need to focus on those outcomes.

Why India has a window of opportunity

India could have a one-of-a-kind advantage in creating the next layer of digital trade infrastructure. First, it has a regulatory framework in place to recognise tokenised trade documents, placing it ahead of many developed economies. Second, it has established a core public digital infrastructure, including Aadhaar, DigiLocker, Account Aggregator, ULIP, and ONDC, which can be applied to global trade use cases.

But perhaps the most significant aspect is India's dense ecosystem of startups, proven in problem-solving, that has evolved to scale digital tools in highly regulated sectors such as finance, identity, and logistics. Now, this very ecosystem has turned to trade and could not have chosen a better time.

What still needs to fall into place

Although there is some early traction, some gaps still exist. Adoption will require buy-in from larger players in the trade: banks, customs authorities, ports, handling of vessels, etc. Regulatory sandboxes may coax tokenisation of BoL flows into real-world settings. Awareness and onboarding support should also be necessary for exporters, and MSMEs in particular, as they constitute the bulk of Indian trade.

Likewise, genuine interoperability will need a concerted effort, whether between platforms or between countries and regulators. Tokenisation is not a silver bullet by itself. But as an alternative to real-time, transparent, paperless trade, it can hold advantages that the traditional system has invariably failed to provide.

The startups have to deal with a complex, regulated, and high-stakes domain, with a focus on long-term application-oriented impact that, if successful, will see an export environment where exporters get paid faster, paperwork becomes trustworthy by default, and India charts the entire course on how digital trade can work at scale.

Future trade, as it exists today, still needs coordination among many moving parts. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this coordination will not be achieved simply by digitising what currently exists, but by rebuilding what can be traded. And startups have taken the first set of bricks to lay.

(Pratik Sharma is the COO and Co-Founder of Automaxis.)