New Delhi: The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) asked e-commerce players including Amazon and Flipkart to display mention ”country of origin” on each product sold at their platforms.

The DPIIT held an important meeting with ecommerce companies regarding this on Wednesday, sources told Zee Media. Sources said that the DPIIT has set August 1 as the deadline to display the origin of products on the website of online retailers.

It may be recalled that in June this year, the commerce ministry had made it mandatory for sellers to enter the Country of Origin while registering all new products on Government e-Marketplace (GeM), a Special Purpose Vehicle.

Further, sellers, who had already uploaded their products before the introduction of this new feature on GeM, are being reminded regularly to update the Country of Origin, with a warning that their products shall be removed from GeM if they fail to update the same. GeM had taken this significant step to promote ‘Make in India’ and ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’.

GeM has also enabled a provision for indication of the percentage of local content in products. With this new feature, now, the Country of Origin as well as the local content percentage are visible in the marketplace for all items. More importantly, the ‘Make in India’ filter has now been enabled on the portal. Buyers can choose to buy only those products that meet the minimum 50% local content criteria.

In case of Bids, Buyers can now reserve any bid for Class I Local suppliers (Local Content > 50%). For those Bids below INR 200 crore, only Class I and Class II Local Suppliers (Local content > 50% and > 20% respectively) are eligible to bid, with Class I supplier getting purchase preference.