[sustran] BBC: India's 'sensory assault course'

[Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory]

* India's 'sensory assault course'
*<http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7330355.stm>

See link below, this is also available as an archived audio broadcast....

[Comment: In Prague as in many other cities in the EU, the big 
box/hypermarket stores at the periphery of cities have "free" bus 
services from, e.g., the end stop on the metro/subway. So, I am curious 
if this is happening in India. In any case, it is clear to me that this 
is not about providing alternatives to the car - as most people still 
prefer to shop by car at places such as I describe because cars can 
carry a lot* - but about drawing people out of their own neighbourhoods. 
Many are "housewives"/domestic life managers who don't have their own 
car to use, as their husband is at work. And when these families have 
money for a second car, that will become the shopping vehicle. By then 
the local choice of shops would have gone down. I call this "suburban 
mobility graduation" or SMG: Going both to and from a city centre, 
customers of suburban trains and periphery-reaching metros "advance" to 
the car when they can afford it because mobility, rather than proximity, 
was the philosophical basis for planning. There has to be stuff 
available by walking or cycling.

* Big store = Big car = Big refrigerator]

****

Peter Day says India's small shops and traditional bazaars are here to 
stay, despite attempts by huge corporations to organise the chaotic 
retail scene.* *

Smells, sights, and sounds assault the senses everywhere in India. And 
shopping is no exception.

In the bazaars of Old Delhi, tiny outlets crammed together offer 
astounding choice for browsers and hagglers.

There is everything - from the most pungent spices and sparkling 
materials with gorgeous trimmings for wedding saris, to fantastic 
handmade fireworks and great spinning wheels of explosive fire - stacked 
outside the shops standing higher than a man.

The noise is ceaseless.

Clustered close to the local railway station, in an edgy district of 
Mumbai, hundreds of squatting hawkers offer an extraordinary choice of 
gleaming fresh vegetables, carrots and green curry leaves, and dazzling 
white piles of garlic, stripped for purchase.

A crowd watches the vada man fry his doughnuts golden brown over a fire 
on his push cart.

In India, people say, there are 12 million of these - mostly tiny - 
retail outlets. But as the country hurtles to join the top global 
economies, huge corporations are mustering new forces to organise the 
apparently chaotic retail scene.

* New retail experience *

Vast shopping malls are leaping up into the sky on the edge of big 
Indian cities.

For the first time, small neighbourhood supermarkets are springing up in 
the centre of towns with air-conditioning and self-service.

In the choking high-technology city of Bangalore in southern India, 
random shoppers were full of praise for the new retail experience in a 
neighbourhood supermarket, owned by a big Indian corporation celebrating 
its first anniversary.

"Everything under one roof and cheaper," said a student.

A couple who had come 4.8 km (3 miles) to shop volunteered another slogan.

"This is going to do a blast of business."

To compete with the streets, the new supermarkets are emphasising 
freshness. The spinach in Bangalore was on the shelves six hours after 
picking. Leaf vegetables are delivered twice a day despite some of the 
worst traffic jams in the world.

* Rowdy protests *

Traditional neighbourhood shops are feeling the heat. Shopkeepers and 
street hawkers in New Delhi complain that takings have halved since two 
supermarkets opened in the past few months.

On several occasions local activists have held rowdy protests which have 
forced the new shops to close their shutters. They say that the entry of 
Western style shopping will hit the livelihoods of 50 million people.

The tiny shops do not stock much - compared with the superstores - but 
they offer quite extraordinary service.

Just a few steps from hundreds of crammed apartments these shopkeepers 
know their customers intimately. They will send round to your home, on 
credit, one single cigarette at 11pm.

Shopping in the rich world has not been like this for decades.

Last year was supposed to be when the multinational corporate retail 
giants were going to pour into India, but it has not happened quite like 
that.

* New markets *

The law is still preventing foreign shops from selling anything but 
their own brand products. That is fine for Nike trainers, Body Shop, or 
Marks and Spencer franchises, but none of the big foreign general 
retailers are allowed.

Instead they have side-stepped the rules with joint venture deals which 
keep their names off the fascias or opened huge cash-and-carry 
warehouses into which they insist they allow only retail, hotel, and 
restaurant customers excluding non-professionals.

Indian politicians are fearful of the retail lobby and the hundreds of 
millions of farmers with a vote.

The new Indian supermarket chains are trying to burnish their reputations.

The store group subsidiary of the Barti telecoms giant showed me its new 
agricultural training centre.

Farmers in the abundant wheat and rice growing country in Punjab are 
shown how to produce four crops of supermarket produce a year, such as 
baby corn or French beans, for export to Europe, but also for the new 
domestic market.

Despite the terrible fact that thousands of heavily indebted farmers all 
over India have committed suicide in recent years, the complex 
traditional Indian supply chain, from farm to retail outlet, is 
remarkable whatever the new supermarket chains say.

It is no wonder that politicians are wary of letting in disruptive 
foreign operators.

* 'Sensory assault course' *

One home-grown retailer, ignoring the allure of rich-world shopping with 
a very different approach, is the distinctively named Pantaloon.

It is a Mumbai based, fast-spreading retailer with a difference. Its Big 
Bazaar shops take their inspiration and their methodology from the 
clamour of the traditional bazaar.

To orderly multinational minds Big Bazaar is a seemingly noisy chaos of 
aisle-less stores, goods piled up on the floor, and extravagant offers.

Buy one, get one free on cleaning fluid, for example.

"India is different," says the boss who proudly showed me round.

"And this is what Indians want."

The Pantaloon is right, at least for the moment.

Despite the blandishments of the new superstores, shopping in India is - 
thank goodness - likely to remain a sensory assault course for some time 
to come.

* From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 5 April, 2008 at 
1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm> 
for World Service transmission times. *

Story from BBC NEWS:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7330355.stm>

Published: 2008/04/05 11:05:26 GMT

-- 
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Todd Edelman
Director
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