Leading e-commerce player Amazon, on Thursday, announced a series of initiatives for India, including tie-ups with the government’s railway and postal department for faster deliveries of seller orders to customers across the country. The Jeff Bezos-promoted company also announced the launch of a generative artificial intelligence tool for its sellers to help them in backend value addition.
“We had recently announced an incremental investment of $15 billion in India across all our businesses by 2030 and will continue to be a partner in India’s growth in the 21st century,” said Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s senior vice president for India & emerging markets.
“I am delighted to know about Amazon's commitment to digitising 10 million MSMEs, enabling two million jobs, and driving $20 billion in e-commerce exports from India by 2025,” said Jitendra Singh, minister of state in the prime minister’s office. “For lakhs of small businesses across India, digitisation can offer economic growth, broader customer reach, reduced marketing and distribution expenses, and access to foreign markets.”
While Amazon India is already using Indian Railways and India Post, the new MoU makes the e-commerce heavyweight the first such entity to partner with the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India (DFC) for faster deliveries, starting with the 659km Rewari-Palanpur stretch, which connects the industrial belts of Haryana and Gujarat. Further additions will happen as the DFC network expands in the coming years.
Similarly, the tie-up with India Post will see the setting up of a thousand Dak Niryat Kendras, where Amazon will set up tech backends to help Indian small businesses easily work out sending products to buyers as well as simplifying cross-border logistics and compliance for those shipping abroad, through Amazon’s Global Selling Programme.
Agarwal said the new tie-ups became a reality after Amazon’s global CEO Andy Jassy’s meeting with PM Modi during his state visit to the US back in June. According to Agarwal, it was Modi himself who suggested expanding the use of the railways and the postal department for “faster deliveries and cheaper prices”.