, Columnist
How Amazon Is Fighting Door to Door to Beat Ambani
The e-commerce giant is going hyper-local to reach the remote corners of the only one billion-plus consumer market it can access.
Amazon India’s IHS partner Jayshri Hodkar at her home tailoring shop.
Source: Anil Chaudhary/handoutThis article is for subscribers only.
If it wasn’t for last year’s extraordinary events, there would be nothing even remotely remarkable about Jayshri Hodkar’s struggle to survive as a single mother of two on the earnings of her tailoring shop, a single machine in one room of a rented house.
It’s one of those tens of millions of tiny businesses you see everywhere in India. Most are so nondescript it's hard to imagine that together they supply the wheels on which the $2.7 trillion economy runs. Their value only became clear when the wheels came off.