Amazon India country manager Amit Agarwal called for stable and predictable policies in India, while welcoming the recent relaxations for other service providers (OSPs) given by the government.
“India’s ecommerce industry is still very early in its evolution, accounting for only 3 percent of total retail consumption. But even decades-old offline businesses are going online,” Agarwal said during the Bengaluru Tech Summit on Friday.
“There is a structural shift towards Digital India and Make in India. India should focus on enabling policies that accelerate this shift. It is important that we ensure a stable and predictable policy framework that attracts long-term investments,” Agarwal said.
Ecommerce companies, especially foreign players, have been impacted by several policy changes in recent years, including tighter norms for platforms with FDI and the recent digital tax.
The Amazon India executive also said that 95 percent of Amazon India’s corporate team is working from home, and hailed the government’s move to completely remove restrictions for other service providers, such as in the IT and BPO sectors, to work from anywhere.
The government removed several compliance requirements for OSPs, which largely work in services such as tele-banking, tele-medicine, tele-trading and ecommerce.
“Liberalised regime for OSPs a welcome move. It is a great example of how pandemic alerted us to act fast and the government jumped on it to make changes,” Agarwal said.
“We are telling corporate employees who can do their work from home to work from home till June 30, 2021. 95 percent of them are working from home, while 5 percent coming to office. We have also brought in 100 plus process changes at delivery and fulfillment centers for the safety of delivery associates,” he added.
