T he pandemic has been the harbinger of bad news, but there have been a few silver linings and Amit Agarwal, Global Senior Vice-President and Country Head, Amazon India pointed one out to us at TNIE's ThinkEdu Conclave. He was speaking during the session titled 'Small is Beautiful: Sparking the Entrepreneurship Within’, which was chaired by Author and Political Economy Analyst Shankkar Aiyar.
Amazon India was able to create 2,00,000 jobs just last year plus it's moving full-speed ahead towards the targets of its 'Digitize India' pledge detailed by Amazon's Founder at the first-ever Amazon Smbhav Summit held in New Delhi last year.
The promise was to digitally-enable 10 million SMBs (Small and Medium-Sized Business), enable 10 billion dollars in exports and create a million jobs by 2025. "Cumulative exports are already exceeding three billion dollars. We have created nearly a million jobs already and are pledging an incremental million by 2025. All in all, we have made meaningful progress on all dimensions. Next four years, we are excited to be ahead of our targets to get there," he said.
Talking about the year 2020, Agarwal said, "We had more than 1.5 lakh sellers go online. The number of sellers signing up to set up on Amazon has gone up by 50 per cent and has accelerated since COVID."
He added that programmes like Local Shops on Amazon has brought in 50,000 local stores across 700 cities and the number is inching towards 1.5 lakh stores towards the end of the current year. He also dwelled on Amazon's Chai Cart programme, under which the cart would travel to India’s business districts and engage in conversations over chai with businesses about selling online.