Ecommerce major Amazon stated that it has created three lakh new jobs in India over the past year, as it continues to grow quarter-on-quarter with more people veering towards shopping online amid the pandemic. This is a third of the number of jobs that founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had committed to create by 2025 when he visited India in January 2020.

Amit Agarwal, Global Senior VP and Country Head, Amazon India, told ET, “We are very confident of exceeding our goal of one million incremental jobs by 2025, over and above the 700,000 that we had in India before the announcement (in January 2020).”

Meanwhile, as far as the goal of digitizing 10 million MSMEs by the middle of the decade is concerned, Agarwal said Amazon has breached the quarter mark, with 2.5 million small businesses digitized by its platform so far.

Though Amazon did not share how much of the $1 Bn it had committed to achieving these goals has been actually spent so far, Agarwal said that that the ecommerce behemoth had spent more capital than it had planned to over the past year because of the pandemic.

The company has also seen a jump in the number of MSMEs signing up to sell on its platform over the past year. Agarwal added that Amazon had added 250,000 new sellers and 50,000 offline shops over this period and is on track to increase the number of (offline) shops by more than 100,000 in the next few months.

There is no denying that the ecommerce sector has received a major boost as there has been a structural shift in the way people buy things, on account of the lockdowns of last year due to the pandemic. In February, Amazon India also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Directorate General Resettlement (DGR), to provide ex-service personnel with work opportunities across its growing operations network, in India. What effect will be the second wave of COVID-19 will have on ecommerce and jobs in the sector, will be something that will unfold in the next few months.