|
What
have been the reasons for the slow pace of growth of Indian
Retail Business in corporate form, as it exists abroad?Retailing
in a corporate form is a sophisticated business. India is
a Third World country. In any Third World country, sophisticated
businesses take their own course of time to develop. Even
in the United Kingdom, a developed country, the street corner
Indian grocery is still there, though perhaps in its last
generation. Even in oil-rich countries like the United Arab
Emirates and Kuwait (which otherwise have a high quality of
life) small groceries owned by individuals exist side-by-side
with corporatized supermarkets and hypermarkets.
Retailing
requires huge investment in infrastructure, utilities, supply
chain management, manpower, quality real estate, etc. It also
has a long gestation period. Indian private sector businesses,
for most part of the past 53 years, have been content selling
substandard products and services to a captive market. The
public sector, on the other hand, has been busy in the core
sectors of the economy. Corporatized retailing cannot be a
core sector of a Third World economy. So, neither the Indian
private sector nor the public sector had reason compelling
enough to enter organized retailing. At best, we had some
community cooperatives but they were different from corporates.
There
is also the issue of self-employment. India has for long been
a job-scarce market. So it was (and still is) socially necessary
to maintain self-employment opportunities for otherwise unemployable
people. Introduction of corporatized retailing would hit the
traditional retailer / hawker and this could generate social
discontent. |
