Centre: Retail trade policy to promote ease of doing biz

NEW DELHI: The government is working to bring a national retail trade policy for brick and mortar retail traders with an aim to promote ease of doing business, a senior official said on Monday. Joint secretary in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Sanjiv said that the policy would also help in providing better infrastructure and more credit to traders.

The Department, he said, is also working to bring an e-commerce policy for online retailers.

“We want that there should be synergy between e-commerce as well as retail traders,” Sanjiv said at a conference on FMCG and e-commerce.

The Department is also in the process of formulating an insurance scheme for all the retail traders.

The accident insurance scheme would particularly help small traders of the country, he added.

“The government is trying to do policy changes not only in e-commerce but national retail trade policy which will be for physical traders which will be introducing ease of doing business, providing better infrastructural facilities, providing more credit and providing all sorts of benefits to traders,” he said.

The joint secretary urged the industry to focus on producing high quality products.

Traders’ body Confederation of All India Traders on Monday said the National Retail Trade Policy will prove to be a half-baked exercise without an e-commerce policy and codified rules and regulations for e-commerce trade. CAIT president BC Bhartia and secretary general Praveen Khandelwal, in a joint statement said the initiative by the DPIIT to roll out the policy is a welcome step and will certainly boost the retail trade of India to a next level. It meets with the long pending demand of CAIT. They demanded that the stakeholders must be taken into confidence before implementing the same.