Much of draft e-commerce policy about data storage, sidelines real e-tail issues

One would have expected the draft e-commerce policy paper to have dwelt more on e-retailing per se, especially since the rules and regulations pertaining to the use and storage of data are pretty much taken care of with the government working on a data protection bill. There is little dispute that individual consumers own their data and have privacy rights and that corporations must store data locally in India. We are also agreed that cross-border data flow must be regulated. Reiterating this ad nauseam doesn’t really add value to the debate. Instead, the government needs to focus on the e-retailing piece; by its own estimate, the B2C segment is tipped to grow to around $200 billion by 2026 while B2B e-commerce is estimated at around $300 billion. As we have seen, in the absence of any momentum on Make-in-India, e-commerce is the sector that is throwing up thousands of job opportunities at all levels, from techies to delivery boys.