Govt wants ‘origin of products’ displayed, calls e-commerce firms for meet

This follows the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform making it mandatory for its listed sellers to specify the country of origin while registering all new products on the portal

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has called e-commerce majors, including Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm, for a meeting on Wednesday to discuss the ‘displaying origin of the product’ on these platforms, as anti-China sentiment picks up in the country. This follows the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform making it mandatory for its listed sellers to specify the country of origin while registering all new products on the portal.

The border stand-off between India and China has sparked a campaign here that is gaining momentum to boycott Chinese products.The meeting is being organised on a video conferencing platform, according to people in the know. Ministry officials said that this issue has come up earlier and implementation issues for e-marketplaces would be discussed at the meeting on Wednesday. Among other invitees to the discussion are Pepperfry and The E-commerce Council of India.

E-commerce executives said asking sellers to fill up information about ‘country of origin’ for new listings of products is not complicated. However, the challenge is that the millions of existing products already listed on the e-commerce platforms don’t have those details and it would be a very “time consuming” process for the sellers to mark the country of origin for those products. However, for some products, this information is already available…Read More

Malaysian PM Mahathir accepts failure of the boom he launched 30 years ago

While Vision 2020 was always more rhetoric than reality, it did serve to harness Malaysia to the climate of the times

Mahathir Mohamad has walked away from one of the big intellectual drivers of his decades at Malaysia’s helm: The idea that the former commodity-dependent backwater could be transformed into a fully developed country by 2020. It’s vital for the Southeast Asian nation’s future that the right lessons be learned from this letdown.

The prime minister conceded last weekend that Vision 2020, his demanding scheme to propel Malaysia to an industrial powerhouse, has failed. Launched in 1991, the plan became shorthand for the rapid development that characterized much of Asia during that decade. Mahathir Mohamad effectively just closed the book on an economic era. For this, he is to be applauded, overdue though such an acknowledgment was.

While Vision 2020 was always more rhetoric than reality, it did serve to harness Malaysia to the climate of the times. Globalization was in its glory days, elaborate supply chains were built throughout the region, and foreign investment poured in. Living standards and education attainment rose, Japan was Asia’s big commercial power and the end of the Cold War made Western-style economic and political opening seem like natural law. I even believed it myself during my tenure in Kuala Lumpur before witnessing the devastation wrought by the Asian financial crisis. Not that Mahathir saw the West as necessarily the best template. He often favored Japan and its model of post-war industrialization, which inspired a signature approach that he dubbed, “Look East.”