Isha and Akash Ambani speak at Meta's 2nd edition of Fuel For India event

"We believe that small businesses are the bedrock of our country's economic backbone. The pandemic really brought home the truth that small merchant shops, retailers, and small businesses urgently needed to convert their physical brick and mortar stores to digital storefronts," mentioned Isha Ambani, Director, Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms, underlining the motivation behind JioMart's collaboration with WhatsApp as pandemic broke to support small businesses through e-commerce solutions

 Isha Ambani, Director, Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms, and Akash Ambani, Director & Head of Strategy, Jio Platforms were speaking with Marne Levine, Chief Business Officer, Meta at the Fuel For India 2021 event, on how India's small business owners and entrepreneurs have taken the pandemic as a challenge to reinvent themselves.

 JioMart has a retailer network of over half-a-million, which is growing every day. Jio and Reliance Retail are adding more and more features to the JioMart app to create greater value to the small retailers, while ensuring greater convenience to final consumer. "It means that we are moving closer to my father's vision of enabling millions of small retailers to become digital first via Jio and JioMart, which for us is a really motivating factor," said Isha Ambani.

 Sharing the future plans for the JioMart -- WhatsApp collaboration to continue adding more features Akash Ambani said, "We intend to build out native features that will not only help users shop seamlessly on WhatsApp but will also have help retailers increase stock assortments, improve margins and get them closer to perhaps a larger base of customers, like never before."

 Payment through WhatsApp is now live using UPI platform. This will greatly add to the level of convenience for the over 400 million WhatsApp users in India 

 With Jio and Meta teams working together, more avenues of collaboration are coming up. Jio on WhatsApp, for example, is now set to simplify the entire 'Prepaid Recharge' process. "It is really exciting how the end-to-end experience for Recharge through WhatsApp along with the ability to make payments can potentially make the lives of millions of Jio subscribers much more convenient," said Akash Ambani.

 India is in the midst of one of the most dynamic social and economic transformations the world has ever seen. Today, more than 700 million people in India have access to the Internet -- and that access is fueling the creation of innovative new enterprises, and connecting people in all-new ways.

 India is rapidly becoming a global hub for innovation, leading the way and setting an example for so many other countries to follow -- especially in a post-pandemic world.

 Fuel For India 2021 is the second edition of Facebook India's annual flagship event to fuel aspirations of a billion Indians. It is a virtual event packed with stories of grit, passion, and purpose, all powering a new future for the country – stories that are scripting India's tomorrow.