A DROWSINESS hangs over the vast new customs post at Wagah, India's main border crossing to Pakistan. A “Jattha shed”, a towering shelter for hundreds of pilgrims, stands empty. The vehicle park has space for 500 lorries, but today just two gaudy Pakistani ones are unloading sacks of chemicals.

Built from pink and yellow stone, the 120-acre (50-hectare) site opened a month ago. Tall white letters spell out “trade gate” across a dust-blown arch that marks the exit to Pakistan. The calm, however, is about to end. The chief at Wagah says the warehouses, vehicle-inspection pits and staff with high-tech scanners are poised to handle as many as 1,000 lorries a day—several times more than before. He pledges to “work round the clock” to let bilateral trade between South Asia's two largest economies bloom like never before.

Pakistan is unpicking official barriers to trade, after last year offering most-favoured nation trading status to India (reciprocating India's 1996 offer). Restrictions on traded goods, notably by road, are going, with potentially huge effects. Road transport is only one-third the cost of shipping goods to Pakistan by sea, via Dubai, as happens now.

Until this year, says Nisha Taneja, a researcher at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, Pakistan let only 14 products enter by road. As that number rises there will be a “quantum leap” in trade relations. She sees “no doubt that trade will increase a hell of a lot” from its level of $2.6 billion a year.

Changes at the border are already obvious. An exporter underlines the inadequacies (high fees, no container trade) but goes on to laud the new post. Shipments now get through Wagah in a few hours, he says, where before they languished in the heat, sometimes for more than a week. An Amritsar-based haulage boss, whose family has run lorries to and from the border for half a century, says he has doubled his fleet to 80, ready for the boom. He is buying land, too, as prices soar.

He says over 4,000 lorries carrying tomatoes from Maharashtra crossed to Pakistan in the past three months alone, a huge increase. A similar quantity of soyabeans has gone to Pakistan's poultry farms. A trader says that, in return, 100 lorries loaded with cement, plus others with gypsum rock and other minerals, will soon arrive daily in India, as Pakistani producers meet demand from Indian constructors. A new oil refinery in India's Punjab may start sending petrol over the border, giving a boost to total bilateral trade.

For Amritsar, a once-thriving city dominated by Sikhs, renewed trade could drive an economic revival. On May 24th the two countries are expected to ease a tight visa regime, allowing multiple-entry visas and access beyond each country's three largest cities. Places near the border like Amritsar hope for an influx of tourists, traders, students and investors.

On May 7th Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, told a visiting Indian business delegation in Lahore that he hopes for closer co-operation in IT, education and health. A Punjabi exporter, over a plate of buttered chicken, is more to the point. He dreams of profits made selling galvanised steel, as he did when Pakistan briefly allowed imports of it after the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir. Others tick off wishlists for exporting car tyres, machinery and pharmaceuticals.

Yet limitations will persist. Rajdeep Uppal, an Amritsar-based merchant who has operated across the border for 15 years, helped lead a four-year campaign for the new Wagah post. He points out how infrastructure, such as Pakistan's small border post, must be improved on the other side. He also wants banks from each country to operate in the other, so that trading need not be done in hard currency. And he wants India “as a much larger, elder brother” to take the lead in opening up, making Pakistanis feel safe, slashing duties on their goods and encouraging them to invest and trade in the bigger economy.