On behalf of a clutch of offline retailers in India, The Retailers Association of India (RAI) has sought help from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) on the unfair practices of e-commerce players in India, reports Times of India. RAI, which represents retailers in India such as Aditya Birla Retail Ltd, Future Group, Fab India amongst others, have complained that the e-tailers are not adhering to the government guidelines. The government setup rules for e-commerce players, under which e-tailers must not have more than 25% of their overall sales from one vendor, and RAI has said in its complaint that the e-tailers haven't practiced it and rather established new sellers to comply with the rules, as per the ToI report. It further added that e-tailers have setup sellers on their platforms like Cloudtail and Appario (Amazon), and WS Retail (Flipkart) to comply with the government rules. The association has also charged e-tailers' pricing, discounts, etc has hurt small offline retailers, and alleged that they have an unfair advantage and deep pockets as they use foreign capital to provide discounts, and work with sellers who have close links with the companies. Offline retailers and RAI has been fighting to create level playing field for offline retailers since a long time now. Back in December 2014, major Indian retailers had sent letters to the Ministries of Finance & Commerce through the Retailers Association of India (RAI), complaining about the predatory pricing on e-commerce platforms. Violating Government's guidelines? Note that, in March 2016, the Indian government’s Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, disallowed FDI…
