Is Indian Retailing moving in the right direction at right pace?

Indian retail is a huge story along the growing incomes in rural, semi urban and urban pockets. Although the distribution of retail is significantly still in the organized sector, the retail is one of the largest sources of employment for the billion Indians and plays a very significant role in reaching out to the disconnected vast population of India, materials through the fractured physical and social infrastructure and despite financial, social and political barriers that have been haunting the other India, a westernised world view is most likely to miss out.

Strangely, the same other India keeps struggling to keep its producing capacity economically sustainable through a supply chain that is unfair to its seasonally employed vast sections of society that are typically eking out a life below the poverty line.

The retail in India is going to be a very huge story in the making of new India, where a rare blend of wholesellers and business model providers like Wal Mart are going to collaborate with post liberalisation Corporates like Bharti to build a back bone of supply that is fair to the producers as well as consumers at the two ends of the spectrum of various stakeholders of retail sector, is going to unlock unprecedented value, on the crest of a new wave of rural branding of global and national players.

The ruralisation of retail is the mantra. As India crawls back to a double digit growth and poverty sees reduction, an infrastructure physically and digitally connecting the unconnected India to the real economy, it is going to be a very bold bottomline at the bottom of the pyramid. Education is now more broad based in a significant number of states. Earnings are to get broad based. Life style is changing everywhere thanks to the telecom penetrating the rural and semi urban India. Consumption cannot lie far behind and in fact, is not lying far behind. The model will be new, at every stage of the life cycle. The technology, management and concepts will be a lot less western and a lot Indian. The players may be global, but the customer whom they will all worship and propitiate is going to be a lot Indian and a lot more Indian. That is for sure.