Rest Easy

The calendar's fourth quarter is notable for its disproportionate share of festivities — occasions when circumspect purse strings loosen, accumulating significant expenditure that greatly aid the cause of private domestic consumption. This is an established phenomenon in the West, building to a Christmas peak, with accepted socio-cultural-economic benefits. Not merely due to an Anglophile tilt, but India too has had Q4 turn into a consumer marketing delight lately, albeit with twin summits on either end. Again, of all shopping destinations, if there be one where such a dance of disposable incomes and Westernised lifestyles should be most conspicuous, Millennium City Gurgaon must possess strongest credentials!

Someone stepping into SRS Value Bazaar at Sohna Road, however, will likely make a strong case for the reverse. Rewind a month and the paucity of options in the neighbourhood, plus burgeoning household earnings, meant that grocery shopping at this establishment was a lecher's delight (of the too-close-for-comfort kind often observed in your average DTC bus). Crowded to the core with sundry shoppers and ill-trained staff, one was forced to jostle through narrow aisles and tightly packed shelves, all barely a moment away from disintegration into total chaos, to get to check-out lanes that stretched to eternity. Yet, come last week of December and far from an upswing in the footfall frenzy, you may well discern a pall of gloom, the droopy shoulders of salespeople a telltale sign of dropping revenue.

So what has changed? The retail epicentre of the neighbourhood seems to have moved to a new postal address: Easy Day — newly established a mere block away. In fact, with Wal-Mart pedigree under its wing, this shop appears to have drawn an expanded clientele (with very obvious results on Sohna Road traffic — in any case prone to highly excruciating gridlock). This shopper upsurge may partly be driven by a novelty factor, or high voltage entry-strategy advertising, but there is a suggestion of more. My thesis posits that the underlying promise in Wal-Mart’s discounter positioning (in our notoriously price-sensitive market), and its comprehensive one-stop-shop concept has helped pull crowds. In point of fact, one must note too that discounts currently offered are minimal and shopping experience — the raw janata rush, indifferent staff etiquette, and serpentine queues — differs little from SRS. Yet, for now, Gurgaon’s yuppie and not-so-yuppie populace is voting decisively with its feet (and wallets).

Easy Day and its kin may well have a grander, more systemic destiny to fulfil. Over recent posts, we have agonised over a lasting fix for India's food security. Yet, despite an immediate inflationary crunch and glaring medium-long term supply inadequacy, our current Government's response remains spasmodic at best — unless, of course, one were to go by those conspiracy theorists that see a deliberate, nefarious design in repeated policy and administration failures. In any case, GOI's assertions of control are rendered meaningless by WPI (and more acutely, retail inflation) metrics with unfailingly sorry regularity.

Thus, in lamenting what ails Indian Agriculture, it is time to shift focus away from reactive tweaks that is the wont of democratic governments, and abandon hope for one-size-fit-all solutions. Instead, we need to address the supply chain in bite-sized increments. The most conspicuous vulnerability lies in storage and distribution — we squander a shameful 20% (likely more) of the food we produce, an abysmal state of affairs by any account (Animal Farm). Granting that our sarkari agencies are scarcely up to the ask of delivering needed-as-of-yesterday supply chain upgrades, the logical conduit for capital and knowhow (cold storage infrastructure, for instance) remains FDI in retail. Hence the pitch for Easy Day and its brethren – the systemic benefits from aggressive backward integration.

This is not an easy cat to bell. We cannot wish away the fears, imagined or otherwise, of thousands of traditional kirana establishments, facing the threat of being overrun. Au contraire, we ought to take a leaf from China’s playbook on extracting its pound of flesh when framing market access and FDI policies. Let organized retail serve a national imperative — aligning policymakers, producers, and customers — to ensure the best deal. And in time, perhaps, technology will deliver required irrigation and yield increases — structural productivity improvements that cannot fructify in one easy day.