After being shut for six years due to Covid, small consignment of wool, borax, yak tail and blankets will make a comeback across the Himalayan passes from India to China. The Lipulekh route in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand, which was reopened for registered barter trade on August 1, and Beijing has given permission for the twenty-fold Indian traders to cross into Taklakot market in western Tibet. The Nathu La in Sikkim opens the same weekend while Shipki La in Himachal is supposed to follow soon. It appears on paper that this is a neat diplomatic score card. In reality, it's a symbolically small gesture, around a trade imbalance that is too one-sided to be corrected with a mountain pass.

Begin with the number of interest rather than numbers that are not. India and China are trading a record $155.6 billion in bilateral trade in 2025, nearly a dozen percent higher than in the previous year, the ambassador of China in New Delhi stated. Even as Indian exports increased to around $19.5 billion in contrast to $131 billion of imports, India became China's biggest trading partner this fiscal year with two-way trade at $151.1 billion, surpassing the U.S. Now, the deficit in trade between India and China stands somewhere between $112 billion and $116 billion, as compared to just $65 billion in 2021 and a revised $99.2 billion in 2020. About 80 percent of this import bill goes into four categories, electronics, machinery, organic chemicals and plastics, the building blocks of Indian manufacturing which New Delhi still cannot produce in volume and at competitive prices. Comparing the two, and the border reopening feels more like a deal when it should be a deal that will be a show on the right stage at the wrong size. Once, goods worth a few crore rupees were traded through Lipulekh's trade point every season but now the bilateral trade of over a trillion rupees is conducted for every month.

So it is not like the reopening is of no benefit. This is livelihood, not geopolitics for the tribal trading families of Dharchula, Gunji and Kalapani and for the Sikkimese traders, porters, warehouse operators and hoteliers around Nathu La. Many had been anxiously awaiting the clearance from China which came in late July, and were upset because a group of 28 Indian traders were turned back at the border in mid-July, even though they had permits, but Nepali traders were waved through. Community leaders have already pointed out that the new barter season will begin in August instead of June, effectively nullifying the most profitable month of the barter season, and leaving traders with stock that hasn't been sold yet and Tibet's warehouses with goods from 2019. Always the selling of this was pretty thin economics. It safeguards a continuity of what otherwise would be a centuries-old exchange route along the old Silk Road and a small, symbolically significant, avenue of people-to-people contact in a relationship otherwise dominated by military standoffs and foreign ministry statements.

The timing also couldn't be better. The announcement comes as a follow-up to a visit to Beijing last week by India's foreign secretary, following a series of contacts since the completion of the Ladakh disengagement in October 2024 and also since PM Modi and President Xi Jinping met in Tianjin last August. Now, direct flights have restarted and both capitals have spoken the diplomatic reset language. However, there has been gradual normalization on the ground, and at certain moments, limited; this is reflected by the delayed and partial reopening. Meanwhile, Nepal has again protested against India and China moving on with trade through Lipulekh without its consultation, adding that the pass is situated in the Nepali territory along with Kalapani and Limpiyadhura. That the trade route from Lipulekh was operating since 1954 and that the route is bilaterally with India and China, New Delhi's stance remains unchanged, and for now Beijing has refrained from taking a public stand on the issue of the territory while conducting bilateral negotiations with India in the field.

The deeper discussion that should be had is not one of a mountain pass. Whether such feel-good gestures are being supplanted by a more difficult discussion India must have with China market access for Indian pharmaceuticals, IT services and agricultural goods NFBs that keep Indian exporters locked out of the Chinese market even as Chinese electronics and machinery enter India virtually unchecked and the strategic risk of relying on a single supplier of critical inputs. It is not a balanced partnership if one side provides finished products and the other provides raw ore, naphtha, castor oil and shrimp. But the bloc's overall trade surplus with the rest of the world has also surpassed the trillion-dollar threshold despite the tariffs imposed by Washington, giving China the opportunity and incentive to continue to export its way out of trouble, especially to India. A move to normalise trade at the border while keeping the bilateral channels closed for trade would be a wrong step for India to take and providing a spurious justification for a better relationship.

Yes, the caravans will again traverse Lipulekh and Nathu La this weekend, which is indeed good news for the families who depend on them for their livelihood. However, the focus isn't on the twenty traders who are crossing into Taklakot. The $116 billion deficit of Indian trade is a figure that no ancient or iconic barter trade can satisfy.