CAIT carries out pilot in Madhya Pradesh to create e-commerce stores for traders

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Jan 17, 2020

The Confederation for All India Traders announced that it has completed a pilot programme in Madhya Pradesh to create separate e-commerce stores for traders in the region and will roll it out across India.

 
CAIT announced on January 16 that it will soon scale-up its programme to help businesses in a wide range of industries to create their own e-commerce stores to allow them to sell products online to reach a wider audience. The programme aims to encourage traders to sell their goods independently, as opposed to on a foreign-owned e-commerce platform.
 
"We are not against e-commerce and [are] rather of the considered opinion that e-commerce is a rapidly growing future mode of business and have undertaken a task to align the trading community with e-commerce by creating individual e-store of every trader in the country," said CAIT’s general secretary Praveen Khandelwal, reported by the Press Trust of India.

“We are against the companies which are flouting FDI [foreign direct investment] policy of the government for their own gains," said Khandelwal, referring to Walmart-owned Flipkart and Amazon against which CAIT has launched many protests.
 
This week, CAIT launches protests across India against Amazon head Jeff Bezos’ India visit. The organisation also recently asked the government to investigate Amazon and Flipkart for alleged goods and service tax evasion and continues to accuse the businesses of deep discounting and other FDI violations.