A plan for Wholesale-Billpay and Delivery Franchise
By: Amit Bhushan Date: 24 May 2014
The political parties should come clear about policies and not indulge in double speak. This is a simple and clear message of the bitterly fought elections 2014 in India. It saw a whole clutch of parties which indulged in double speak almost wiped off with the families controlling such parties publicly struggling to devise a method to rebuild the political edifice back from scratch post results. It is incumbent upon the new incumbents to come up with clear guidelines regarding policies and procedures that are seen as transparent and equitable by public while the struggle within their party regarding what policies can be pushed to be adopted by government and how?
The case of FDI in Retail is a curious example. While FDI in Retail per se seems to be out of favour (as per the new incumbents), FDI in Wholesale as well as E-commerce seems to be an ‘in thing’. Technologically, the difference between Wholesale and its extension to Retail is very limited and can easily be bridged by e-commerce. All you need is a clutch of Billpay outlets with a computer attached to network in locality which is attached to the wholesaler’s outlet. This Billpay franchisee should have trust of the local people from whom he collects orders and money and places it on the wholeseller’s site. The Wholesale outlet supplies the goods at defined interval by consolidating such orders up to a minimum threshold value and collect payments minus the franchisee’s commission. The franchisee delivers to the buyer. This is sort of minimum investment franchisee business model which can be run from home or home office of franchisee outlets. Several such franchisees can be on-boarded on a single white labeled platform, so that a customer may feel he is placing order to his franchisee online while placing online orders which are routed seamlessly to wholesaler.
India is progressively loosening restrictions on FDI in wholesale and E-commerce apparently to control inflation and committing to expensive fast track maglev trains to improve infrastructure and domestic travel and tourism climate as well as investments. The impact on domestic jobs of such policies is at best hazy while ICOR (Incremental Capital Output Ratio) as a measure deteriorates for the industry. Its time perhaps the elected representatives both in government as well as in opposition become more alive to the reality of situation where the ‘Farm Fresh’ elected representatives already exceeds more than 50 per cent of the legislature. Meaning the life of elected leaders has become too fragile as more than half are replaced by entirely new members without prior legislative experience and this percentage keeps on increasing. Such ‘employee’ turnover (among representatives) depicts gross dis-satisfaction and since the representatives themselves are leaders, so they have no one else but self to be blamed.
Its better the parties in fray apply themselves to evolve mechanisms which enable the members to ‘think better’ and devise solutions which are more acceptable to public rather than kidding themselves with fist-fights for public consumption while they continue with status quo. What is sought is clarity of policies after anticipation of their impact, and its communication to public rather than ambivalence, prejudices and dogmas dominating public discourse. This would support public voting on issues and public policy then can have much greater clarity regarding what is supported. Presently, almost all political parties maintain confusion and then try to make hay in sunshine with the tacit support of media which blares out political agendas of the parties rather than common sense questions of ordinary public. And yes, all newbie parties should continue with the good work and try to mobilize public opinion to new establishment as they try to evolve a robust structure for themselves which is in sync with the time we live in.