There is a lot to be said for big retail to come to India, but we cannot simply be taken in and mimic something

which is being pushed down our throats by policy makers who themselves does not know how retail really works in india .

employing 7% of the total workforce

Retailing in India is one of the pillars of its economy and accounts for about 15% of its GDP

The retail industry is divided into organised and unorganised sectors. Organised retailing refers to trading activities undertaken by licensed retailers, that is, those who are registered for sales tax, income tax, etc. These include the corporate-backed hypermarkets and retail chains, and also the privately owned large retail businesses. Unorganised retailing, on the other hand, refers to the traditional formats of low-cost retailing, for example, the local kirana shops, owner manned general stores, paan/beedi shops Unorganized in India constitutes 96% of total trade, while organised trade accounts only for the remaining 4% Indian retail is highly fragmented, with about 11 million outlets operating in the country and only 4% of them being larger than 500 square feet in size.
India has about 11 shop outlets for every 1000 people.

Drawbacks

My fellow frend was talking about rupee appreciation , rupee apreeciation !!! that sounds cool but at the cost of what. The heavy price which we have to pay is unemployment. 1. Independent stores will close, leading to massive job losses. Walmart employs very few people in
the United States. If allowed to expand in India as much as Walmart has expanded in the United States, few thousand jobs may be created but millions will be lost.Let alone the average Indian

retailer in the unorganized sector, no Indian retailer in the organised sector will be able to meet the onslaught from a firm such as Wal-Mart , tescon Carrefour, etc. when they come with there incredibly deep pockets WalMart will be able to sustain losses for many years till its immediate competition is wiped out. This is a normal predatory strategy used by large players to drive out small and dispersed competition. This entails job losses by the millions.

2. Foreign players will lower prices to dump goods, get competition out of the way, become a
monopoly, then raise prices. We have seen this in the case of the soft drinks industry. Pepsi and Coke came in and wiped out all the domestic brands.

3. India doesn't need foreign retailers, since homegrown companies and traditional markets may be
able to do the job.

4. Work will be done by Indians, profits will go to foreigners.

5. Asia's largest milk producer Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation which markets its dairy products under the brand Amul, yesterday opposed FDI in retail saying that Indian dairy farmers would suffer if such a move is allowed. For now 70 80% of the profit goes to farmers. 6. India has 35 towns each with a population over 1 million. If Wal-Mart were to open an average Wal-Mart store in each of these cities and they reached the average Wal-Mart performance per store we are looking at a turnover of over Rs. 80,330 mn with only 10195 employees. When compared with the trend in India, it would mean displacing about 4,32,000 persons.

7. A good way to measure the effect of retail power on farmers and farm workers is to look at the portion of each dollar spent on food at the supermarket referred to as the retail food dollar that goes back to the farm. By this measure, virtually all food producers in the US have seen their share of the retail food dollar decline over time, at points dropping so low that farmers have been forced out of business.