The first Indian ecommerce think tank meeting was held yesterday. It was convened by Suresh Prabhu, the Commerce Minister, to discuss the framework for the National Policy on ECommerce. During this meeting Minister Prabhu said the framework would be drafted in the next six months.
This framework will relate to the ecommerce sector issues like FDI, intellectual property rights protection, taxation policy, data flows, physical and digital infrastructure. At the meeting the authorities concluded by setting up a task force to look into the inputs provided by the stakeholders.
This meeting was attended by 50 stakeholders from the Reserve Bank of India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and the Competition Commission of India. Indian Internet leaders Flipkart, Ola and Paytm were also present at this meeting. Representatives were sent from Reliance Jio, Wipro, MakeMyTrip, JustDial, Pepperfry, UrbanClap, TCS, Bharti Enterprises and Practo to the meeting.
Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia explained, “The task force will come out with a set of recommendations which would be brought before the think tank in five months. The think tank will give its report in six months.”
The task force along with its subgroups would deliberate on all the issues in detail. This comes during the fight against reclassification of discounts as capital expenditure by the Indian ecommerce sector heads.
The Commerce Minister also explained India was growing exponentially in the ecommerce sector and would continue to grow. He further stated to ensure this growth it needs to be promoted with the help of the policy. The Minister called on the ecommerce firms and said they would need to play a greater global role. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT,) retaliated at the Ministry of Commerce for not including representatives of trade at the meeting.
Secretary General of CAIT Praveen Khandelwal said the CAIT had made multiple complaints against the malpractices of the ecommerce companies. He further added the Government was choosing to avoid the traders and take no action against the complaints.
