Amazon India on Thursday announced a $250-million Amazon Smbhav venture fund to help get started-ups.
The fund will invest in get started-ups and entrepreneurs that concentrate on digitising compact and medium corporations (SMB) and drive technologies-led innovations in agriculture and healthcare.
The worldwide e-commerce firm that has generally been accused by neighborhood traders of backing preferred sellers and resorting to discriminatory company practices also launched a slew of initiatives for compact corporations at the 4-day Amazon Smbhav summit beginning Thursday.
The firm stated that it plans to bring almost one million Indian offline retailers and neighbourhood shops to its marketplace by 2025 by way of the Local Shops on Amazon programme. Besides, it will undertake a ‘Spotlight North East’ project that aims to bring 50,000 artisans, weavers and compact corporations on the internet from the eight states in the North East area by 2025 and to increase exports of important commodities like tea, spices and honey from the region.
Amazon stated, “these initiatives reaffirm the company’s pledge to digitise 10 million SMBs, enable $10 billion in exports, and create one million jobs by 2025″.
The firm’s annual Smbhav event it introduced last year to celebrate its growing community of SMBs has been countered by local traders who collectively launched ‘asmbhav’, a virtual event to “raise voice against practices of foreign e-commerce retailers”. The summit is becoming helmed by representatives and supporters of more than 6,00,000 compact Indian traders, distributors, and merchants, each offline and on the internet. A important point that emerged at the occasion was that there is a want for stricter regulation and penalisation for wrongs completed by the foreign retailers posing as marketplaces, they stated in a statement.
“My request is for the RBI to investigate Fema violations wherever these have taken place so that the foreign platforms if they are defaulters, can be checked and stopped,” stated Ashwani Mahajan from Swadeshi Jagran Manch.
Traders say that when Amazon claims to have lakhs of sellers on its platform, practically 80% of its company comes from chosen sellers.
The trader groups stated the situation of ill-therapy of compact retailers at the “hands of so-called platform owners turned marketplaces” was also discussed. According to Abhay Raj Mishra, president at Prahar stated: “the small to medium-sized traders have been constantly subjected to a cruel bias by the foreign retailers. It is apparent that these merchants serve no other purpose than just becoming lifeless statistics for the large platforms to claim bragging rights on reach and depth”.