Digital instruments must
benefit all
G.Srinivasan
At long last, the
m u c h - a w a i t e d
draft e-commerce
policy was released
on February 23,
2019, days ahead
of the announcement of the
polls. At a time when the big
retail giants like
Amazon/Flikpart keep
watching Indian markets with
mouth-watering expectations,
the 42-page policy draft
flagrantly tightened
regulations, over and above
the ones it placed on digital
payment and social media to
parade its control of the
country’s emerging digital ecosystem.
Flagging off the much-touted
mantra that “data are the new
oil”, the government ‘s ecommerce policy draft
declared with justifiable glee in
deference to the Swadeshi
tech lobby, that “just like oil or
any other natural resource, it is
important to protect data”.
As the implications of the
new draft began to kick in,
India’s jumbo business
magnate Mukesh Ambaniowned Reliance swiftly seized
time by forelock by
announcing a new e-commerce
platform to what it called to
”enrich” millions of small
shopkeepers. It unveiled plans
for investing in five tech
companies, which specialize in
services ranging from logistics
to voice technology and which
all partake of the group’ “digital initiative”. Reliance
Retail, with 10,000 stores panIndia, has been ranked the fifth
fastest emerging retail
company in the world by
Deloitte!
India’s jumbo
business magnate
Mukesh Ambaniowned Reliance
swiftly seized time
by forelock by
announcing a new
ecommerce platform
to what it called to
”enrich” millions of
small shopkeepers.
No sooner the draft ecommerce policy came to light,
than the Trump Administration
had declared that India would
no longer be eligible for the
U.S Generalized System of
Preferences (GSP) that accords
duty-free access to the
lucrative U.S markets for
domestic exporters to
penetrate and profit by.
This unilateral reprisal from
the U.S follows the systematic
tightening of digital regulations
by India that range from
compelling global payments
firms to store data locally,
draft laws to compel social
media companies to break
encryption and ushering in ecommerce laws that made the
retail giants such as Amazon
and Walmart to restructure
their operations to unveil
policies slapping greater
privacy safeguards.
A palpable and perspicuous
worry is that by such tightening
of digital eco-system, India
does not foster instruments of
state surveillance a la the
Middle Kingdom, nor private
monopolies such as the United
States.
Considering the stark fact
that Mukesh Ambanipromoted Jio telecom network
having bagged over 200 million
subscribers in just two years by
unobtrusively but decisively
inflicting a mortal blow to
competition in the market
place and now into the new
digital initiative of investing in
five tech companies, the level
playing field for domestic and
foreign firms does not turn
propitious to one particular domestic private company at
the cost of competition and to
the deprivation of benefits to
legions of consumers who
usually lap up discounts and
cheaper products with
immense satisfaction!
The feisty Finance Minister
Arun Jaitley, citing the policy
changes that made foreign
financial services firm such as
MasterCard, Visa and
American Express that fell in
line with the new-fangled rules
requiring them to desist from
storing Indian user data
offshore, gloated in November
last thus: “Today Visa and
MasterCard are losing market
share in India to indigenously
developed payment system of
UPI and Rupay card whose
share has reached 65 per cent
the payments done through
debit and credit cards”.
While this is welcome from
the standpoint of domestic fintech firms to take root and
emerge robust, any attempt to
make foreign firms feel
strangled by regulations would
discourage their commitment
to invest here and stay
invested with the attendant
benefits of best managerial
practices and modern
technology in making life
easier for legions of aspiring
Indians who seek to get a slice
of decent living.
So whichever party or
combination of parties
assumes office after the
electoral battle is over, the
onus is on it to ensure that the
fruits of technology reach all in
a fair and equitable fashion
and that the providers, both
indigenous and the foreign, do
not feel discriminated in the
fair game and the uneven level
playing fields, policy wonks
plaintively but plausibly
put it.