Retail in Rural India

RETAIL IN RURAL INDIA

Introduction
Introduction of modern-format, large-scale retailing is nothing less than an innovation in the area of Indian distribution and retail activities. Unlike most other developed and developing markets of the world, modern-format large-scale retail in India is a recent phenomenon. While “India’s retail sector is expected to grow from its current $350 bn. to $427 bn. by 2010” (Morierty, et al, 2007 : 9), modern retail is expected to grow from $8 bn. to $22 bn over the same time-period. It is re-defining consumers’ attitude towards shopping. It is also forcing the consumer product companies to re-define their ways of doing business – while they have been used to dealing with traditional retail in a certain way over the decades, they are learning the skills of managing major accounts while dealing with modern format retail. Many of them are re-discovering their organization structures and are putting in place new structures to handle modern retail.

“Almost every major Indian business house are either getting into the retail space or are consolidating and expanding their presence in the retail space at a feverish pace.” (Sengupta, 2008 :1). The mega initiatives in the food and grocery sector include the likes of the Reliance Group of Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Fresh & Reliance Hyper), Future Group of Kishore Biyani (Food Bazaar), RPG Group (Spencer’s Retail), the Aditya Birla Group (More), Wadhawan Holdings (Spinach), R Subramanium owned Subhiksha, J Raheja group (Hypercity) etc. To add to these we have the recently opened Easy Stores by the Walmart-backed Bharti Retail. In the area of non-food retail, there is now a Shoppers Stop in apparel retail, Croma in consumer electronics & IT, Mobile Store in telecom retail, Welhome in specialized retail of towel and bed-sheets, Titan in watch retail, Tanishq in jewelry retail, and the list goes on. In terms of formats also, urban India today has almost all the major retail formats namely...