India’s Small Merchants Take on Amazon With Protest Meeting
- U.S. retailer kicks off event for small businesses Thursday
- Half a million small traders, merchants plan a protest summit
A vendor wears a jacket featuring the logo for Amazon.com Inc. at Sadar Bazaar in New Delhi.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/BloombergHundreds of thousands of small Indian businesses are planning to protest against large foreign retailers like Amazon.com Inc. in an event Thursday that coincides with the U.S. e-commerce giant’s annual seller jamboree in the South Asian nation, a sign of escalating tensions in the retail market of 1.3 billion people.
The summit is the latest protest by local traders, which have long accused global retailers Amazon and rival Walmart Inc.-owned Flipkart of masquerading as platforms and employing unfair practices that hit at the livelihoods of small online and offline sellers. The trader groups’ event is named Asmbhav, or “impossible” in Hindi, and takes place on the first day of Amazon’s annual seller extravaganza, called Smbhav, or “possible.”
“Over half-a-million sellers and leading small trader groups are participating in the Asmbhav event which will focus on ruined livelihoods because of the bullying and partisanship by e-commerce marketplaces,” said Abhay Raj Mishra of the non-profit Public Response Against Helplessness and Action for Redressal (PRAHAR), one of the organizers of the event spearheaded by a collective of Indian sellers.