Draft e-commerce policy: government extends feedback submission deadline

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Mar 11, 2019

The government has pushed back the deadline for feedback submissions for its draft e-commerce policy by three weeks to March 31 after a number of companies demanded more time.

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade met with a number of e-commerce companies and some of them voiced that they wanted a separate data policy. “No one was against data localisation, but they asked for limited sharing of their consumers’ data,” said a senior government official as reported by ET Bureau. Due to this, the feedback submission deadline has been pushed back to give stakeholders more time.

The stakeholder meeting included businesses such as Amazon, Microsoft, Snapdeal, MakeMyTrip, Reliance Industries Ltd., and eBay as well as a number of trade bodies including the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) and the Confederation for Indian Industry (CII) among others. Businesses stated that they want a policy that favours traders and buyers, as well as retail trade and banking sectors. Notably, Facebook, Google, and Walmart were not present in the discussions.

The draft e-commerce policy was first floated on February 23 and proposed the regulation of cross-border data flows and locating computing facilities in India to create jobs. It also suggested setting up a data authority for data sharing issues. Microsoft opined that restricting data flow across borders could hurt Indian AI start-ups and Amazon was against the suggestion to better regulate fake goods online as it stated this would merely push them offline.