New Delhi: The government has begun working on “Indian special models” for people like Amazon and Flipkart to collaborate effectively with mothers-and-pop shops.
This step is part of the government review of the design of consumer protection rules for e-commerce.
Over the past few days, the Minister of Trade and Piyush Industry Goyal, who are also responsible for consumer affairs, and their officials have held several rounds of discussions with companies, both India and abroad, to understand concerns with the draft existing guidelines released for public consultations .
Government sources say that there are two-three main areas, which need to be changed, and the guidelines will try to overcome this problem.
Some problems flowing from the way this sector has evolved with a series of different rules for homegrown players who do not face restrictions on direct sales to consumers, while foreign players facing the sidewalk.
The design of rules about consumer protection is uniform regardless of business ownership, but they affect domestic players such as the Tata Group from selling some of their products on “Super Applications”.
However, government officials clarify that there will be no compromise to protect consumer interests, ensuring that the conflict of the seller’s interest is avoided.
The details of new norms will be done in the coming weeks, but from discussions over the past few months it has emerged that there can be an effective solution that can offer “win-win deal” for e-tailers such as Flipkart and Amazon and Kirana Shop.
This can lead to various models such as where local stores are used to ship goods and also join the seller’s network on this platform, said government and corporate sources.
It also coincides with the demolition of “non-obedience structures” such as Cloudtail, the partnership between Amazon and Narayana Murthy’s catamaran, which is the largest seller on the e-tailing platform.
Earlier this week, Walmart, who controlled Flipkart, said that India had a set of rules itself, needed to fulfill.
As long as the government has focused on obtaining e-marketplaces to comply with foreign direct investment guidelines, which do not allow them to sell directly to consumers.
While limitations are not possible to be drawn, there is an increase in realization in the government that the model must be done to benefit everyone.