amit agarwal amazon india talks about the evolution of amazon over the past eight years in india and its pledge to bring one million small businesses online in the next four years on customers side it wants to improve their livelihoods edited excerptsamit agarwal it is a relief to see the cases go down but the situation is clearly not normal so i would encourage everybody to be safe get vaccinated and take care of themselves at amazon i would say we actually just finished eight years in june so it has been a very fulfilling journey customers and sellers rely on us more than ever before it is very humming to see how starting from a small website just selling books in ten cities hundred sellers we have come a long way at this moment pretty much the whole organisation has been very pivoted and focussed on keeping our employees safe serving our customers and small businesses during these tough times and also doing a bit to help the community and the government to come out of this crisis and at least get to the part where as you said we can reboot our economy so while we have been very focussed on community efforts whether it is transporting medical equipment helping with vaccinations helping small businesses with insurance and so on on the business side our focus remains the same how do you make sure that we offer to our customers what they are looking for offer them great value empower our sellers so that they can reduce their cost of operations and make it possible for customers to get what they are looking for fast and reliably so at this moment our focus is very much on bringing our small medium businesses back on line they have been disrupted advt we have launched several programmes we have launched this programme called local shops and you would see us grow that considerably this year where we are allowing offline stores to use amazon as their online presence so that they can get orders from their locality customers online through amazon grocery is very important category we have seen customers move online for their grocery needs we are very excited how they have responded to our service and we actually have combined our fresh and pantry service into one single service where customers can get fast to our delivery and they can also save money on multipacks large packs shipped next day prime has been doing extremely well we just release our family man 2 season and customers responded very positively through prime we continue to entertain our customers we are offering them free fast delivery so they should see lot more value through prime payments is a big priority for us as customers moved online they are using amazon pay we have more than five million offline stores that accept amazon payments you can pretty much book your tickets pay your bills send money to anyone buy