New Delhi, Jan 16  (KNN) Over five lakh traders, across 300 cities, came together under the umbrella of Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) on Wednesday to protest against the visit of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who announced an investment of USD 1 billion to train MSMEs join online platform.

Bezos announced an investment of one billion dollars to bring more than one crore Indian businesses online and enable exports of India-made goods worth 10 billion dollars by 2025.
 
Reacting over the same, CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said the business model of e-commerce giant Amazon and its subsidiary Flipkart involves predatory pricing and deep discounting which has created distortionary effects.
 
''It’s not an investment but promotional finance to Amazon India to crush retail trade and encouraging his team in India to do more predatory pricing and deep discounting and go on in violating FDI policy.'' Khandelwal added.
 
Regarding his announcement of 10 billion dollar of exports, Khandelwal said ''It’s ridiculous. Jeff Bezos want to build a false and wrong narrative to show that Amazon is pro small traders. What Amazon has done to empower 5 lakh retailers already registered on their portal. The answer will be big no.''
 
''Does any such retailer exists in top 20 sellers of Amazon in past 5 years. The answer will be big no. Then on what basis Jeff Bezos is claiming to do exports from India. He also talked about helping in Digitalisation but the question is who has asked his help. The traders are quite capable in India to digitalise themselves under our PM Narendra Modi flagship program of Digital India,'' he asserted.
 
Earlier this week, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) launched an anti-trust probe to look into these allegations.
 
"The economy of this country has been run by traders since Independence, and we will keep running it in future too. If any foreign company wants to do business in India, it has to follow the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy and laws of the land in letter and spirit," said Khandelwal.

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