The problem is with the politicians' focus being on such relatively trivial issues.
From the ecomm websites point of view, I don't think they will mind much. They would have long term benefits from this one time exercise of creating the apps. In fact, these politicians are giving them free advertising and consulting support
.
They already would have the workforce to create such local language apps when they would have done it for Hindi.
1. They get to tap into a large population that speak only these local languages
2. They can have a side deal with these politicians to get additional tax breaks etc. for complying with these requests
3. In terms of population and growth, I have zero doubts that India and Africa are the only places left for these organizations like amazon, apple, and google if they want to continue and grow. There is a limit to the amount of growth you can get by catering to less than 2 billion people (US, Europe). They are already into hundreds of billions of worth, now to grow even single digits they need huge incrementals to justify the price to stockholders. Even though the per capita income for India/Africa will be a fraction of the westerners, how long will that last? At what point do the skewed younger demographics and outsourcing start to bridge that gap.
In short, with China having its own companies, it is not at all surprising these companies want to do everything to secure their futures in India