As dawn peeled open the sky above a wholesale market in Vashi, India, piles of fruits and vegetables destined for the country's fancy new supermarkets were inching toward death.
Lettuce and carrots lay in sludge. In the loading area, traders performed their morning ablutions, rinsing their mouths and spitting on the tarmac. Meters away, men unbuckled to urinate. Insects danced in the puddles.
"Gently! Gently! Gently! Gently!" Ashok Kamble, a buyer for a new Western-style supermarket chain being built by Reliance Industries, barked at a group of delivery men slamming boxes of produce onto the bed of his truck.
PHOTO: NYT IMAGES
Yet as India rushes into the future, its byzantine, wasteful retailing regime is confronting a new foe: the ruthlessly efficient supermarket, with its boulevard aisles, refrigerated trucks and meticulous workers.
No industry entwines all of India -- from its desperate, suicide-prone farmers to its urban consumers -- more than the US$300 billion-a-year retail trade. And no industry has more potential, if transformed, to resolve modern India's most pressing challenge: to enrich the poor.
The spread of supermarkets is already forging new paths between the city and villages, and a recent journey along Reliance's supply chain -- from the farm to the wholesale market to the supermarket -- gave glimpses of real change.
Reliance, the largest Indian company outside government control, entered the supermarket business only in the last few months. It opened its first wholly owned store on Friday in the southern city of Hyderabad.
Western-style supermarkets could change the way India's farm produce is ultimately sold. Fearful that a Reliance or a Carrefour would crush a hereditary caste of traders, clusters of small shops are studying how to combine their operations to emulate the efficiency of big stores.
Simultaneously, major retailers are mimicking elements of the intimate, full-service model that has made small stores nearly indispensable to most Indians.
"This is going to change the face of India," said Vishal Mishra, a Reliance employee, leading a reporter on a tour of Manchar, a sleepy village in western Maharashtra state from which Reliance buys produce.
The promise for more change lies ahead for India's 700 million villagers, if they can be coached to grow better crops at higher yields, economists say.
Indian villagers today farm for survival, just as their forefathers did 500 years ago. Farmers can't save because they grow low-margin crops. They have low margins and low yields because they fail to invest in better seeds and in technologies like drip irrigation. They fail to invest because they have no savings.
Rahul Gulab Pokharkar, a fresh-faced farmer at 20, stood with three generations of family in his carrot fields in Manchar and spoke of breaking that cycle.
For as long as they can remember, the Pokharkars have lived from loan to mouth, with never more than a few rupees on hand. The middlemen gave them seeds and fertilizer on credit, and then took the harvest as repayment.
Two years ago, the family turned to big companies -- first Godrej Industries, an Indian conglomerate with a small chain of high-end supermarkets, then Reliance.
Because the companies cut out middlemen, they pay more than market price. They pay in cash. And with farmers' help, they select, package and transport the produce more vigilantly than in the past.
Under a silvery sky, the Pokharkars were carefully grading carrots, choosing the best ones for Reliance.
"Before, we sent even spoiled ones to the market," Pokharkar confessed. "Not anymore."
Now the Pokharkars have US$100 to US$200 in cash on hand, and zero debts to any middlemen.
Their next project is to convert 1.5 hectares from carrots to cauliflower. This could earn a 100 percent return in the first year. In conversations with the Pokharkars and other villagers in Manchar, the subsistence mindset appeared to be ceding, slowly, to entrepreneurial elan.
But for all the optimism at the beginning of India's food chain, there is anxiety at its end. Small retailers say supermarkets will destroy them.
Small shops are wasteful, lifting prices 20 percent higher than in big stores. They buy in small amounts. They have no expertise in inventory control and category management, and so they fail to buy the most profitable mix of products: At Nutan Stores on Carmichael Road in Mumbai, a typical operation, the offerings include such slow-moving items as ink, birthday candles and oil pastels.
Devraj Damji Pasad, the 63-year-old co-owner of the store, said the arrival of a single supermarket a few kilometers away had slashed his store's sales by 60 percent, forcing the dismissal of seven out of 11 workers. He used to sell 36 bottles of ketchup a month; now, fewer than six.
But small stores are indispensable to Indians. They provide credit. They deliver US$0.20 of medicine to your home at midnight.
And so a war is gathering between the efficient but sterile supermarket and the neighborly but wasteful small store.
The Spinach supermarket looks, at first blush, like any Western supermarket. At its branch in the Mumbai suburb of Bandra, the air is cooled, the aisles wide, the paint fresh.
Then you notice Pramod Kumar.
Spinach has hired a roadside fruit seller to bring the cajoling craft of the small trader into the supermarket. On a recent afternoon, Kumar, 25, was yelling across the room to women to visit him, begging them with puppy-dog eyes to buy just one kiwi, just one.
As supermarkets think smaller, small stores are thinking big. Technopak, the consultancy, has been hired by 150 small shops in the city of Rajkot, in western India, to help them survive.
The stores, with annual sales of US$22 million, want to build a joint purchasing organization and to computerize operations.
Yet for small-time sellers without the means or will to change, penury draws closer.
Jagram Yadav, a vegetable seller in Mumbai, said that before Reliance came, he fed his wife and two children 60kg of vegetables a month -- two potatoes and two tomatoes per person per day. Now, with the first of 1,500 planned supermarkets luring his customers away, the Yadavs eat 30kg a month.
"Reliance has come," one passer-by said, "and these people will be swept away."
The US government has signed defense cooperation agreements with Japan and the Philippines to boost the deterrence capabilities of countries in the first island chain, a report by the National Security Bureau (NSB) showed. The main countries on the first island chain include the two nations and Taiwan. The bureau is to present the report at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The US military has deployed Typhon missile systems to Japan’s Yamaguchi Prefecture and Zambales province in the Philippines during their joint military exercises. It has also installed NMESIS anti-ship systems in Japan’s Okinawa
‘WIN-WIN’: The Philippines, and central and eastern European countries are important potential drone cooperation partners, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung said Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) in an interview published yesterday confirmed that there are joint ventures between Taiwan and Poland in the drone industry. Lin made the remark in an exclusive interview with the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper). The government-backed Taiwan Excellence Drone International Business Opportunities Alliance and the Polish Chamber of Unmanned Systems on Wednesday last week signed a memorandum of understanding in Poland to develop a “non-China” supply chain for drones and work together on key technologies. Asked if Taiwan prioritized Poland among central and eastern European countries in drone collaboration, Lin
Renewed border fighting between Thailand and Cambodia showed no signs of abating yesterday, leaving hundreds of thousands of displaced people in both countries living in strained conditions as more flooded into temporary shelters. Reporters on the Thai side of the border heard sounds of outgoing, indirect fire yesterday. About 400,000 people have been evacuated from affected areas in Thailand and about 700 schools closed while fighting was ongoing in four border provinces, said Thai Rear Admiral Surasant Kongsiri, a spokesman for the military. Cambodia evacuated more than 127,000 villagers and closed hundreds of schools, the Thai Ministry of Defense said. Thailand’s military announced that
CABINET APPROVAL: People seeking assisted reproduction must be assessed to determine whether they would be adequate parents, the planned changes say Proposed amendments to the Assisted Reproduction Act (人工生殖法) advanced yesterday by the Executive Yuan would grant married lesbian couples and single women access to legal assisted reproductive services. The proposed revisions are “based on the fundamental principle of respecting women’s reproductive autonomy,” Cabinet spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) quoted Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君), who presided over a Cabinet meeting earlier yesterday, as saying at the briefing. The draft amendment would be submitted to the legislature for review. The Ministry of Health and Welfare, which proposed the amendments, said that experts on children’s rights, gender equality, law and medicine attended cross-disciplinary meetings, adding that
RSS