Hon'ble
MoC to meet top officials from Amazon, Flipkart
New Delhi, Nov 10:
In a bid to reinvigorate the postal department by linking it with the
booming e-commerce industry, IT and Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad
is scheduled to meet the heads of Amazon India and Flipkart this week.
Amazon India
Vice-President and Country Manager Amit Agarwal and Monique Meche,
Vice-President of Global Public Policy at Amazon, are scheduled to meet Prasad
tomorrow.
Flipkart co-founder
and CEO Sachin Bansal is also expected to meet the minister on November 13,
sources said.
They said the agenda
of the meeting is to discuss ways in which India Post, the world’s largest
postal network, can be utilised by e-commerce players to deliver goods across
the country.
Prasad, they said, is
of the view that with its unparalleled rural reach, India Post would be best
suited to offer delivery services to e-commerce players.
The Government is also
looking at using e-commerce to improve the efficiency of postmen, and
contemplating ways to incentivise them for timely delivery of goods.
“The postmen are
expected to get some reward for timely delivery of products, although it’s just
an idea as of now,” said a source.
India Post has over
1.55 lakh post offices, of which more than 1.39 lakh are in the rural areas. On
an average, a post office serves an area of 21.21 sq km and a population of
7,175 people.
According to market
analysts, the last-mile delivery of products ordered by online shoppers will
figure as one of the major deciding factors for e-commerce firms such as
Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, and so on.
These firms offer
one-day delivery to their clients and the demand is expected to further
intensify as they are investing in logistics to ramp up their delivery system.
The opportunity in
back-end logistics for the online shopping segment is estimated at Rs. 3,500-4,000
crore, a major part of which is last mile delivery.
According to a joint
study by consultancy firm PwC and industry body Assocham, the size of the
e-retail industry is poised to touch $10-20 billion by 2017-2020 and e-commerce
firms are expected to spend up to $1.9 billion by 2017-2020 on infrastructure,
logistics and warehousing.
Source : http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/
