Indian Retail Entrepreneurs and International Marketers: A Viable Business Ecosystem For Indian Start-Ups

India has become one of the largest and fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world. This unprecedented growth has been spurned by India’s large population (17.7 % of the world's population live in India), its young population demographic, and the government's recent policies to open their e-commerce market to foreign investment. The government has started programs to promote Indian entrepreneurism as a means to grow the Indian economy. As a result of large foreign e-platform firms skirting India’s retail competition laws, stricter e-trade regulations have been put in place by India’s government. Liberalization of the e-commerce market in India has brought prosperity and risk. Along with the benefits, there are changes in the narrative about economic growth that can have long-term effects on how individuals and governments approach change. Change on the order of magnitude required for implementing the “Digital India” program is hard to comprehend; how India’s diverse population deals with this change will depend on how it is perceived. “Digital India” has already generated a number of billionaire unicorn platform entrepreneurs— it has also generated thousands of informal sector, platform dependent, “independent contractor” entrepreneurs. This review and synthesis of the literature discusses how words like “entrepreneur”, “ecosystem”, “co-creation” and “partner” take on new meanings with respect to e-platforms and their complementors. The changing meaning of words has an impact on the perception of what change brings to governments and communities. For this reason, the language of “economic growth” discourse is important and should be discussed and debated in ways that respect the powerful nature of narrative in the process of change— the framing of discourse will affect issues of distributive justice.