The government is in the final stages of drafting new ecommerce rules, tweaking an earlier draft that had sought to tighten the regulations for foreign-owned marketplaces, including barring their affiliated entities from selling on the platforms and restricting flash sales.
The new version will be released soon, said a senior official of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution who did not wish to be named.
Top industry bodies representing the Tatas, Amazon, Walmart-owned Flipkart and others have opposed some of the proposed clauses in the earlier draft. Some of the key provisions have also not found favour with the finance and corporate affairs ministries, and the government’s public policy think tank, Niti Aayog.
Given the differences, the Department of Consumer Affairs has held discussions with several companies and industry associations on the proposed amendments, said the official.
Controlling commodity prices
The Ministry of Consumer Affairs, which also looks after food and public distribution, has been using data and predictive analytics to keep the prices of pulses under control for the past three months, the official said. The department has developed a price forecasting model to predict the prices of major pulses six months ahead of a possible spike.
The autoregressive integrated moving average with explanatory variable (ARIMAX) model uses estimates of domestic availability of commodities at mandis and imports, thereby predicting supplies months earlier.
Source : Economic Times
