Annie Zaidi: How will FDI level the playing field for small traders?

Here’s a little rhyme I’ve cooked up: “To market, to market, to find a clean loo/ on again, caffeinated, diddley-doo/ To market, to market, to find a little peace/ home again, home again, tumbled and creased.”

I don’t like shopping in malls. I might go in to watch a movie, or to just sit there at a coffee shop and stare at nothing. But I (and hundreds of thousands of urban residents, especially women) are grateful for malls because they have toilets.

Around 2007, there was a small uproar when the big boys — corporations like Reliance and Subhiksha — started selling potatoes and grain. There had already been a lot of concern about foreign direct investment in retail. What would happen if Walmart came to stay? What about the kirana store and the poor women who came to sell fruit at our doorstep? But Indian corporations had already jumped into the potato-vending act. Millions stood to lose jobs if corporations acquired farm produce directly from farmers — middlemen, wholesalers, artiyas or futkars, and palledaars (men who load and unload goods at mandis). So they were protesting and shattered the glass facade of a newly-opened Reliance Fresh outlet in Delhi.

It doesn’t matter that much whether or not Walmart arrives. We already have Reliance and More and Big Bazaar. As a buyer of potatoes and multi-grain atta, it’s the same to me. I’m basically looking at a glass-fronted alternative to the subzi mandi.

Is this good for me? Probably not, given that fresh food is always better than food kept for days in cold storage.

Is it good for the environment? Probably not, given how much paper and plastic packaging is used by big corporations in their packaging of food.

Is this good for farmers? We only have to look carefully at districts where corporations are acquiring foods directly and figure out whether farmers’ lives have changed for the better, particularly small and marginal farmers. Besides, if elimination of middlemen is our chief concern, the best thing to do is to set up farmers markets in every suburb of every town, where farmers are free to come and camp every day and bring us absolutely fresh, chemical-free food.

So what exactly does the big supermarket giving the consumer that the local vendor cannot? Well, toilets for one. I’d much rather shop in a competitive, open-air market but a customer cannot be king in matters of retail if her/his bladder (and dignity) is at stake.

I was covering a protest rally in 2007, in Delhi, when a vegetable vendor called Dulaare Lal complained about how ‘companies’ — foreign or Indian — are treated with respect by the state. They have the benefits of electricity, water and endless space. In contrast, Dulaare Lal didn’t have a license to operate on the roadside.

Dulaare Lal paid Rs50 every day to be allowed to sit at Gol Market.

But he was allowed to sit only between 5pm and 8.30pm. Dulaare Lal had one little bulb hanging overhead. Dulaare Lal knew that customers — the ladies especially — need toilets. He and other vendors had been begging the municipality to build facilities, for they were forced to relieve themselves in the street nearby. But there was no toilet and no running water. When it rained, vegetables rotted because there was no shelter and the municipality wouldn’t permit vendors to have plastic roofing.

So the way I see it, the question worth asking is not whether FDI in retail is bad for us. The question to ask is how we might level the playing field for independent and small traders.

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)