On 09 march 2021, NASSCOM submitted a set of suggestions to the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), the nodal government department for the e-commerce industry, asking for government intervention in various ways in order to move forward in building an enabling ecosystem for the industry.
Our suggestions included the following:
- Facilitate Indian businesses to sell online
A. Create Infrastructure
- Enabling policy environment to drive public and private investment in infrastructure development, such as, creation of warehouses, sorting centres, multimodal logistics networks (air, rail, road).
- Creating communications infrastructure to support a strong digital backbone for the industry.
- Creating logistics infrastructure for smooth delivery and returns, e.g., last mile connectivity.
- Central government to facilitate discussions with state governments for creating infrastructure in a structured manner.
- Encouraging state governments to adopt a common minimum agenda to facilitate e-commerce.
B. Support for MSMEs
- Handholding support for digitisation and onboarding onto online platforms.
- Incentives to offset digital marketing and branding costs to promote “Make in India”.
- Enabling wider adoption of digital payments by MSMEs.
- Tax incentives for setting up warehouses and data centre facilities.
C. Proactive role by state governments
- Establish/identify manufacturing clusters; leverage One District One Product programme to promote targeted products through omnichannel retail.
- Help in onboarding more sellers online through upskilling and training cells.
- Adopt a common minimum agenda to facilitate e commerce.
D. Ease of Doing Business
- Bring parity in GST thresholds for online and offline sellers.
- Enable small businesses registered under composition scheme sellers to sell online.
- No cancellation of PPoB registration for lack of traditional physical set up.
- Digital invoices for transporters.
- Effective roll out of the Code on Social Security Rules, to deliver desired benefits to gig workers in partnership with e-commerce platforms.
E. Stakeholder Involvement
- Consult with industry stakeholders for development of e commerce ecosystem.
- Include representation from e commerce industry on the Open Network for Digital Commerce Steering Committee set up in November 2020.
2. Facilitate e-commerce exports
- Create delivery infrastructure, in terms of logistics solution through India Post which is low cost, fast and tracking-enabled; and designate Foreign Post Offices at all district headquarters.
- e-Commerce Export Zones (EEZ): ‘one stop shop’ for storage, certification, testing, customs clearance, expedited processing of export incentives, GST ITC refunds etc.
- Single Window clearance for exports: Create a single window clearance system Integrate Customs’ ICEGATE system with other systems (such as IEC by DGFT, EDPMS by RBI and GSTN).
- Create awareness among MSMEs: Organisations entrusted to accelerate exports to create awareness on benefits of omnichannel retail e commerce exports for businesses and train on digital marketing, digitisation etc.
- Dedicated customs clearance lanes for facilitating 100% mandatory online processing of customs clearances.
For more information, please write to garima@nasscom.in.
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