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Despite many modern retailers clocking monthly revenues
(or poised to clock very shortly) that will make each of them a billion
US dollars or bigger business in the current or the next fiscal year,
there is no sign of the massive socio-economic disruption feared by the
people, he is reported to have told Business
Standard
After the entirely inexplicable sound and fury of 2006 and 2007, when
even the rumours of a mid-level manager appointment at Reliance Retail
made headline news, many more important news items have gone past, barely
noticed by the media.
Hopefully, the media will now start focusing on the actual performance
of the many large retail businesses already operating in India and even
perform the role of unofficial ombudsmen in the absence of any cohesive
government policy or regulator relating to the retail sector.
The next 24 months will see heightened activity in the
Indian retail sector. At the recently concluded World Retail Congress
at Barcelona, while the official theme was sustainability, the unofficial
theme was surviving slowdown in the developed markets by focusing on the
developing ones.
India again was the star attraction and more than one
global mega-retail CEO talked seriously about their interest in India.
Hence, whether FDI is permitted or not, modern retail (of Indian and international
origin) will continue to grow exponentially and is now well poised to
hit the $100 billion (about Rs 400,000 crore) revenue mark in 2013 or
2014 and perhaps $200 billion (about Rs 800,000 crore) in revenues by
2018 or 2019.
Of course, even at that level, it will just account for
about 25 per cent of all retail consumption in India and hence the so-called
traditional retail will have also grown by almost 50 per cent from the
level in 2008.
Rather than behaving like the ostrich in the sand, the
government must now firmly accept the reality that India needs an efficient
and organised retail sector to supplement the traditional retail system
especially when it comes to categories such as food and other basic needs,
concluded Singhal.
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