Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Traders’ body Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which represents 7 crore traders, has made a “strong demand” to provide an economic relief package for the trading community with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. In a communication to the minister, CAIT said that it is high time for the government to provide relief to the business community “which is worst sufferer of Covid-19.” “If an adequate package is not given to traders, the domestic trade in the country is likely to be collapsed to a large extent,” the body said.
“The traders were expecting that a package by the Government will be given to traders around 14th April but almost 14 more days have gone and as of now there is no word about the package which is worrying the traders and disturbing them a lot for their future,” Praveen Khandelwal, Secretary General, CAIT said.
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The confederation had recently announced a tie-up with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) to launch an e-commerce portal to facilitate the delivery of essential goods from local Kirana stores. This came days after Reliance’s Jio Platforms partnering with WhatsApp to offer grocery services through its JioMart platform. The hyper-competitive e-commerce market in India is currently led by Amazon and Flipkart while BigBasket and Grofers are the leading digital grocery players.
Amazon too had strengthened its hyperlocal play through its recently announced a new initiative ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ to help customers discover and buy products from their local shops. Amazon was piloting the scheme for six months with more than 5,000 shops based in over 100 cities including metros, tier I and II cities. The sellers were operating in the kitchen, home, furniture, apparel, automotive, beauty, electronics, grocery and other categories.