REINING IN BIG E-TAIL
On October 3, 2014, 7, Lok Kalyan Marg in New Delhi, the official residence of the prime minister, was preparing to host a special guest. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of the world’s largest online marketplace, Amazon, was scheduled to meet Narendra Modi, just months after the latter had assumed office. “He (Modi) has a fantastic international reputation. I am super excited to meet him,” Bezos said ahead of the meeting. This followed an announcement of investment of $2 billion by Bezos’s company in India, as it took on home-bred e-tailer Flipkart. India, with its burgeoning middle class, was an exciting new place for Amazon to grow. To put it in Bezos’s words, India was “super-energising”.
Cut to January 2020. The 56-yearold’s visit caught national attention yet again, but for all the wrong reasons. Not only did the world’s richest man get the cold shoulder from the Modi government, Amazon also had to go through the ignominy of being accused by commerce minister Piyush Goyal of “predatory pricing”.
On January 16, a
