Get small units into organised retail

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: from SSIs echo that of various civil society institutions in India and abroad, about the ill-effects of large stores on community. Armed with research in the US and Europe, these groups warn that even if chain stores could save us some dollars here and there, it comes at a great cost. The large stores hugely impact the local small businesses and cause significant loss of secondary economic activity: transport firms, accounting, printing, etc.

Also, these stores are not embedded in the local community and scarcely care or contribute, it is charged, in social and community development.

They conclude that loss of small business activity in cities do break the foundation of social connections and the culture of cities changes dramatically.

In my view, the debate lies not so much on ‘allowing FDI in retail or not,’ but on large general-merchandise discount stores, domestic or foreign, versus the millions of small kirana shops. Large Indian corporate houses are either already into organised retail or are seriously planning to. Their impact, if it is bad, would be no less than that of MNCs.

If a meaningful policy intervention needs to be devised at all, it has to be ‘large versus small’ and not ‘Foreign versus Indian.’

The fact is that big Indian cities are in dire need of large merchandise stores. Fear of loss of jobs due to large stores is, in the case of India, grossly exaggerated. The largest retail employment is at locations where only the small and traditional units can reach and survive; they service highly niche markets.

The question is how to ensure more participation of local small businesses in organised large-format retail. This will answer what India will get by opening its billion-people market.

We are a group of Quality consultants and have developed an IT-based quality package for SSI units. We want to know how many SSI clusters there are in India. Kindly guide us on where we can get the list.

—R Deepak, from Bangalore

The number of SSI clusters would depend on the criteria to define a cluster. However, according to the third all-India SSI Census, there are 1,223 clusters of registered SSI units (based on 100 or more units producing the same product). The number of clusters in the unregistered segment is estimated to be 819 (based on 500 or more units producing the same product).