There is a concerted effort by foreign lobbying organisations to pressure India to abandon its Digital Competition Bill. Lobbying is everywhere in the corridors of power, by think tanks both in India and abroad, industry association that house under the guise of startups but are actually working for foreign companies and even think tanks and policy advocates have been roped into to force the government to give up most of the clauses of the Digital Competition Act. It is essential to understand the importance of this bill, which is expected to level the playing field not only between Indian and foreign digital companies but also enable the Indian manufacturing sector to survive the onslaught of Chinese imports.

Digital is taking over the retail sector at a breakneck pace; buyers are moving away from offline to digital, malls in metros are already witnessing a stagnation in rentals or vacancies. The online digital market is expected to touch $325 billion by 2030 according to Deloitte, growing 2.5 times the offline retail market. Real estate consultancy firm ANAROCK is even more bullish, it says that digital retail will touch $550 billion by 2035 in a report titled “Future of Retail". It estimates the overall online market will jump to $325 billion in 2030 from $70 billion in 2022. However, it will be larger than the organised retail market, which is projected to reach just $230 billion in 2030, doubling from a base of $110 billion in 2022.

Organised retail is defined by companies such as Trent and Reliance Trends, which rent malls and sell through them. Lobbyists try to downplay this growth of digital by comparing it not to the organised retail, but to the total retail market, where the unorganised sector is much larger. These lobbyists keep saying that digital is so small that it does not matter. Why are we trying to curb its growth? Online retail is driven by technology, creating jobs that fuel further innovation.

Not only is the size of the online retail market increasing at an exponential rate, but it is also becoming consolidated among just a few players. Mostly monopolies like Amazon and Walmart owned Flipkart. The government has attempted to curb the unethical practices of these monopolies, which include predatory pricing, capital dumping, seller discrimination, and masquerading as marketplaces when they are retail organisations. Unfortunately, existing laws under the Competition Commission of India........

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