The department for promotion of industry and internal trade is fine-tuning a discussion paper on formulating a national retail policy for the country.
“We have a discussion paper, we are refining it and doing it internally,” Anil Agrawal, joint secretary of the department, under the ministry of commerce and industry, said at the visual retail summit of industry body Confederation of Indian Industry on Tuesday. The discussion paper covers several dimensions to formulate a retail trade policy, including ease of doing business, regulatory reforms, upskilling of the workforce within the sector and enabling retail traders to be more digitally adept.
Retailers have been batting for a national policy that will help form a framework and mobilize the sector, 80-85% of which is still largely unorganized. The sector provides employment to 50 million people.
CII, along with management consulting company Kearney, released a report on Tuesday enumerating the industry’s requirements to form a comprehensive retail trade policy, though the timeline for its rollout remained unclear.
The report includes streamlining approvals and compliance mechanisms for ease of doing business, improving access to capital, rapid adoption of technology and modernization by traditional retailers, bridging logistics and supply chain infra gaps, and enhancing labour participation and productivity.
CII’s report has also pushed for uniform guidelines governing retail. The retail trade in India is governed by many laws, including the Shops and Establishments Act, Competition Act, Consumer Protection Act, Essential Commodities Act and the Legal Metrology Act, it pointed out.
In many cases, retailers need to obtain 16 to 25 licences to open a store. The large number of laws, compounded by state-level variations in implementation, create immense complexity for retailers, especially those with a pan-Indian footprint, the report noted.
The government is working towards reducing compliance burden for small and larger retailers, Agrawal said. “One of the basic efforts of the policy is to reduce the compliance burden to make it easy to start a business and to keep it operational,” he said. The second aspect is about regulatory reforms, although it is a sub-set of ease of doing business, he said. Some major reforms have already been brought about by the Centre, in terms of agricultural reforms, the APMC Act, the Essential Commodities Act, Agrawal said. These are in line with some of the recommendations of the industry.
A national retail policy needs to be rolled out with immediate effect to bring all forms of retail under one umbrella, said Shashwat Goenka, chairman, CII national committee on retail and sector head (retail and FMCG), RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group.
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