Walmart & Amazon unveil MSME push, amid backlash from industry groups

The Indian Express

Published By: Ashish Aryan

US-based retailers Walmart and Amazon on Monday stepped up efforts to boost their image of being MSME-friendly by launching similar, albeit different, training programmes for India.

Walmart, which had earlier this year bought a controlling 77 per cent stake in home-grown Flipkart, announced the creation of a supplier training and development programme ‘Walmart Vriddhi’. The programme aims to train 50,000 small businesses so as to enable them to be suppliers for global supply chains. The global retail conglomerate has tied up with NGO Swasti to open 25 training institutes where it aims to train micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) entrepreneurs in tailored courses.

“The Vriddhi programme will encourage Indian suppliers to make for online and offline customers around the world, including, but not limited to, the supply chains of Flipkart and Walmart,” Judith McKenna, president and CEO, Walmart International, said at an event here Monday.

Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon’s Indian arm, on the other hand, announced a partnership with industry body Confederation of Indian Industry “to facilitate MSMEs to develop their business further by listing and selling their products and services online”. Amazon India will also conduct workshops, roadshows and e-commerce training for MSMEs with an objective to train them in “leather & footwear, apparels & textiles, automobile, cycle parts and handicrafts” businesses.

The efforts by both Walmart and Amazon India come in the backdrop of continued protests and agitations by the RSS-affiliated Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) and the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT).

SJM had initially opposed Walmart’s entry in India, and later slammed their stake buy in Flipkart as “circumventing” rules for a “back-door entry”. It had also written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to ensure the interests of those at the bottom of the retail and agriculture chain should be protected after Walmart’s India entry.
SJM national co-convenor Ashwani Mahajan had, in his letter to the PM, said the Walmart-Flipkart deal would “not only kill entrepreneurship, and was anti-farmer” but would also “kill job creation opportunities in the market.

CAIT, on the other hand, had approached the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal against the Competition Commission of India’s clearance to the Walmart-Flipkart deal.

More recently, both CAIT and SJM made vocal requests to the PM, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal to probe both Flipkart and Amazon India for deep discounting on their websites.

In a letter, CAIT had said the deep discounting by Flipkart and Amazon meant that they were selling goods much below their fair market price, which was leading to a loss of goods and services tax (GST) revenue for the government.

The traders body had also urged the FM to “institute a probe into this business model” which was “causing huge GST revenue losses to the government” and recover the difference between the billed price and market value of such goods from both the retailers.
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Reference:https://indianexpress.com/article/business/companies/walmart-amazon-unveil-msme-push-amid-backlash-from-industry-groups-6158901/

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