Harsimrat Kaur Badal asks ministry to relax restrictions over Amazon's food plans

In a major push to Amazon’s food retailing business, union food processing minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal has urged the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) to adopt a softer approach on this e-retailers’s ambitious $500-million project which has not been able to implement due to policy hurdles. This project is stalled mainly due to operational curbs which have been imposed since it won the approval. 

“Last month, I met the officials at DIPP to sort out Amazon’s food retail venture, which had met with some roadblocks,” informed Badal in a media interaction. 

First, DIPP was not allowing them to have it (food retail and marketplace products) in the same space. Then they told them to maintain separate inventories.” The minister said that while DIPP has agreed to relax the requirement of maintaining separate warehouses, the department is yet to allow Amazon to use the same transportation and logistics resources for distribution in both ventures.

Amazon has already made a hefty investment in scaling up its support infrastructure including warehouses, logistics and transportation arms in India. Despite having state of the art resources Amazon has not been able to utilize them for food retailing venture due to policy hurdles. 

Amazon has constantly been fuelling up its Indian business with major investments. As per the media resources, the company will be pumping additional $2 billion to $5 billion which they had announced in 2016.