Big & small must tie up for retail's growth

(continued from last week)

One of my students at IIMA, Byomkesh has started happysprouting.com as a venture that comes out with new combinations and dressings every week.

This is the power of small-scale entrepreneurship which needs to be harnessed with large-scale retail. NIF has signed an agreement with Future Group to set up a company, ‘Idea India ka Innovation’. This is precisely the logic. Products of our innovators cannot generate market unless they are made consumer friendly through investments in design, research & development and supply chain management.

This company is supposed to provide the necessary push and take the products and services to a much larger audience and share the benefits with creative communities.

Whether the scaling-up process is ethical or not, will depend on self-regulation by the supply chain manager and the regulators of the system. Sustainable extraction and utilisation of biomass for various foods and other products has to be ensured.

Similarly, design of spaces on shelves and display systems will need to be changed. We cannot follow the western model where supply manager decides that consumer will get only one or two types of potatoes, brinjals and tomatoes.

New models of shelf-space design, offering dozens of varieties with blackened packaging and delivery, will mean incentives for agro-biodiversity conservation.

The food and diversity of culture are closely linked. With the help of SRISTI and NIF, we have organised Sattvik Traditional Food Festival for past seven years on the IIMA campus.

Small village communities and farmers that produce organic stuff have earned Rs5 lakh per group in the three-day, annual affair.

With hundreds of stalls and 45,000 people participating in this festival, a point has been established. A market for decentralised, diversified and sustainable production and consumption does exist.

It is possible that all my hopes about behaviour of multi-brand retail in the future prove wrong, but nothing prevents me from trying to prove it right. I hope the government listens to saner voices pleading for a partnership between different stakeholders to serve interests of producers, consumers and retailers.

Just imagine a neighbourhood retailer that gives you a comparative table of prices of different products from different supermarkets, and offers home delivery as well! Why would you then like to go to the mall, locate a parking spot and lug the shopping bags around?

I’m sure there is a large number of working couples and other young or old people wanting to be serviced at their doorstep. Small retailers will serve that need, but with a much richer catalogue on his Aakash tablet.

The big retailers must incorporate smaller, local players in their household delivery system so that we can reduce transportation costs incurred by every singular consumer going to the supermarkets.

Let us hope that Indian creativity will once again manifest and surprise the cynics and force the enthusiasts in creating a much more open and accountable platform for dialogue and delivery.

Anil gupta is a professor at IIMA and can be reached at anilgb@gmail.com