Accordingly with the big players having reached out to the Government to give them breathing space on the new compliance measures beyond the January 31 deadline, the Industry ministry has not responded, leading to panic attacks across the board. Meanwhile powerful stakeholders led by Walmart and Amazon from the e-commerce eco system have sought a six month extension since lakhs of sellers small and medium sized in the market place need to be educated, IT-enabled and connected to meet the statutory audit requirements.
Furthermore Industry Secretary Ramesh Abhishek, who was earlier encouraging the major players to ramp up their investments in India, has not responded to their pleas and petitions. Presently the situation has become precarious primarily because the clarification to press note 2 was even more confusing and on a granular level, the market place cannot have any equity in the seller.
Moreover the audit requirement on the sellers by opening their books to the marketplace in such a short time is reminiscent of the haste in the launch of GST, which threw small businesses out of gear. Reportedly many of the sellers will now have design IT systems and the marketplace cannot be liable for this and there is no clarification on how to conduct the private label business.
