9/11 – 2016 is a momentous day in India history – you like it or not, things are not going to be the same again. Some had a tumultuous last night, others had a happy peaceful sleep – but the impact of this night is going to be felt in immediate and long term. Perception of this change as positive or negative, depends on whether you are a Modi Backer, Hater, Leftist / ‘Pseudo Liberal’ or a Fence sitter. Barring the hard core haters, you can’t help but applaud the meticulous planning that has gone into this ‘surgical strike on parallel economy’. Even the ‘Pseudo Liberals’ with their rightful scepticism and tending cynicism, have not entirely written off the reformation potential of such a move.
The economic ‘surgical strike’, is supposed to have a direct
impact on curbing black money, fake money racket, terror financing. Strangely
enough, it can also be looked upon as a self-inflicted wound on the political
class as a whole. The entire political funding mechanism is going to see a change
of gargantuan scale; optimistically, even a common man can think of fighting an
election at par with a political heavyweight. Taking the courage quotient
further, this is going to impact the ‘Bania’ class – supposedly the core
support base of BJP. Hopefully good senses will prevail; the new found sense of
nationalism, will help people tide over the near term pain.
Talking about near term pain, some are taking solace in
thinking that the higher denomination notes will be back in due course and it
will be business as usual. But, don’t be so sure, there are definitely some
more tricks up the sleeve.
It’s a happy day for Digital Commerce. Post the Holiday
boost, the next few days to a week, we can expect a surge in sales, at least
for the grocery and general merchandise stuff. On a long term front, Digital
Payments seems poised for a boost, thus positively impacting Digital commerce
in general.
In pure eTailing terms, COD (Cash on Delivery) has been a
necessary evil; bleeding most of the players. But given that the customer did
not have full trust with neither the Digital payments nor the order delivery
process, COD helped tide over these initial hurdles.
Despite the government push, the trust factor might not
improve drastically - too soon; more so, owing to the Debit Card compromise
incident.
What might happen rather; is a paradigm shift in the
definition of COD - it might rather be ‘CARD
on Delivery’. The ‘CARD’ here might mean a Credit, Debit,
Cash Card and Mobile Payment Wallets.
‘CARD on Delivery’ will necessitate changes in logistic
requirements and operational processes for the carriers. The personal carriers
owned by individual players will obviously be more agile to this change. But
coming to the independent carriers, it remains to be seen – who is faster in
this adoption game. It would be interesting to see, how nationalized carriers
like India post respond to this changed scenario.
There might as well be a plethora of other unanticipated
impact – let’s keep our guards up.
Let’s drop ‘e’ and enable commerce by all digitally enabled means.
No comments:
Post a Comment