Elite club: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with industry leaders on Friday

Bengaluru: E-commerce giant Amazon on Friday said it will create a million — or 10 lakh — new jobs by 2025. The announcement comes a day after commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal played down on Thursday the Seattle-based company’s $1-billion investment in India as “not doing a favour (to the country)”.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos on Wednesday had said he will invest $1 billion to digitise small and medium businesses and export ‘Make in India’ goods worth $10 billion to the e-tailer’s global markets by 2025. Amazon said it has created 7,00,000 jobs in India already, directly and indirectly, over the last six years and the total jobs created by the local arm would stand at 1.7 million by 2025. These jobs — both directly and indirectly — will be across industries like information technology, skill development, content creation, retail, logistics and manufacturing, the company said in a statement. The direct jobs created by Amazon in India stand at over 60,000. “We’ve seen huge contributions from our employees, extraordinary creativity from the small businesses we’ve partnered with, and great enthusiasm from the customers who shop with us — and we’re excited about what lies ahead,” said Bezos, the world’s richest man with a net worth of $115 billion.

His comments are of significance amid Amazon’s tension with government officials, who have been reluctant to meet Bezos, unlike his last visit in 2014 when he met PM Narendra Modi as well. To add to that, just before his arrival in India, the Competition Commission of India ( CCI ) opened an investigation against Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart over issues like deep discounting, favourable terms to select sellers. Goyal’s comments on Thursday made the strain in the relationship evident.

A TOI analysis of direct jobs on Amazon’s global jobs portal showed there has been a rise of almost 75% in India at 2,235 openings currently compared to 1,236 a year ago. These numbers of openings — the highest compared to other markets in Asia-Pacific — are across Amazon arms like e-commerce, payments and cloud. Amazon said its job creation is aligned with the Indian government policy that has prioritised this and skilling initiatives — including the training of more than 400 million people by 2022 — in rural and urban areas.

In his letter on the Amazon India platform, Bezos said he is adding 10,000 e-rickshaws in Amazon’s delivery fleet and that it will eliminate single-use plastic from its fulfilment network by June. “The boundless energy, innovation, and grit of the Indian people always inspire me,” he added in the letter. On Friday, Bezos also met senior business leaders in Mumbai including Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani , Airtel’s Sunil Mittal , and Future Group’s Kishore Biyani .

