| With a population of 1.1 billion people and a retail industry expected to explode over the next few years, Western store giants Wal-Mart, Tesco and Carrefour can't help but look longingly at India. The foreign retailers are barred from setting up shop there now, but one could soon be getting a foot in the door via a joint venture, reports Forbes.com.
Bharti Enterprises, one of India's two biggest telecom operators, has said it was in the final stages of choosing a retail partner for its farm unit, FieldFresh Foods.
Wal-Mart and Carrefour have been in talks with the company, but Bharti Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal revealed at a London trade conference that Tesco was on the short list. Until the barriers for foreign retailers are relaxed, overseas merchants are reduced to busying themselves in India's wholesale sector or forming joint ventures.
FieldFresh, which uses the tagline 'Linking Indian fields to the world', is itself a 50-50 partnership between Bharti Enterprises and ELRo Holdings India, an investment firm founded and owned by the Rothschild banking dynasty.
Considering FieldFresh's ostensibly British connections, or the fact that it already supplies some food to Tesco, it already looks likely that Bharti will choose the UK candidate over Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour.
Research conducted by IGD, a not-for-profit food industry research organisation, earlier this year suggested that Wal-Mart will be the first to enter the Indian food and grocery retail market, either with its hypermarket format, or at least with cash and carry operations in the unrestricted wholesale sector.
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