Weekend Economists' Harvest Ball September 21-23, 2012

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45. Centuries of Indian life could be extinguished by the arrival of Walmart

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/21/indian-life-extinguished-by-supermarkets


Traditional Indian street vendors and markets will be threatened by an influx of foreign supermarkets. Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP

Certain habits in Indian life once gave an illusion of permanence. On hot afternoons 30 years ago, for example, you could lie on your bed under a slow-turning fan and hear noises from the street that had been the same for at least a century. The lonely wife in Satyajit Ray's film Charulata heard them in the film's celebrated opening sequence as she flitted about her Victorian mansion in 1870's Calcutta like a trapped butterfly, and in 1982 you could hear them still: some rhythmic chanting, the hollow patter of a little drum. And if, like Charulata, you went to the window and looked down, there in the dusty lane you would see a gang of coolies shouting something like a work-song as they pushed a wooden-wheeled cart with a heavy load, or a street entertainer drumming up business with his tabla. The most common sounds, however, were the singsong calls of peddlers selling fish or vegetables, or milky sweets and ancient biscuits from a portable glass case. Some salesmen rode bicycles; that transport apart, these were scenes that looked as if they had existed for centuries and would never be expunged by modernity.

Their extinction is coming – not immediately and not everywhere, but probably inexorably in the middle-class districts of the big Indian cities, now India's governing coalition has said it will open up the retail market to foreign supermarket chains. The coalition put the plan on hold last year after some of its smaller parties, notably West Bengal's Trinamool Congress, branded it as against the interests of "the common man". The postponement suggested a weak and muddled government. Economic growth was faltering, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, looked particularly ineffectual, and the administration's reputation suffered the lash of critics at home and abroad (not least in the USA). Last week it decided to face down opponents and show its free-market muscles by reviving planned reforms that will allow familiar European and American names – Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour — to build stores in cities of more than a million people, providing the local state government agrees.

Western supermarkets arrived in China several years ago and there is now hardly a country in the world without them. India's resistance came out of what Louise Tillen, an academic at the India Institute in King's College London, describes as a "compound of opportunism and ideology" in a democracy that tolerates dissent and political fixes, but that resistance looks to have collapsed. The government says the marketing, technical and managerial expertise of the big supermarkets will transform food production and consumption by cutting out middlemen and building the system known as "the cold chain" that delivers fresh food swiftly from the field to the shelves. The farmer gets higher prices, the consumer pays lower ones and less food is wasted: the supermarkets hire staff in their thousands, no food rots in the warehouses.