Photo Essay – Street Vendors, Around Town
Threatened by Foreign Direct Investment.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
‘Every Little Helps,’ Tesco tells us. ‘Save money. Live better,’ promises Walmart.
So, the Indian government has announced foreign direct investment in the multi-brand retail sector. Will Khari Baoli spice bazaar in the Walled City relocate to a purpose-built commercial zone in Sector 23, Gurgaon?
Is this the dawn of the dead?
What will happen to our sabziwallas and galli vendors?
For the subsistence level retailers, a minor drop in their earnings can cause a major drop in their calorie intake.
As tempted as you might be to shop for packaged, processed, bar-coded and MRPed cauliflower, potato and spinach, think of the impact this will have on your neighbourhood sabziwalla’s sales of gobhi, aloo aur paalak.
For him, every little really does help.
Every little helps
Instead of inviting foreign companies the government could have done something about promoting Cooperative Society culture among a homogenous group of retailers ( say Sabziwala Cooperative, Fruit Sellers Cooperative).Amul Cooperative has been so successful!..Delhi still has a feel of the traditional market…If you see in Hyderabad every significant road has been sold to Indian retail giants: Reliance Fresh, Spencers, More, Foodworld, you name it..!!It’s real bad ! Instead of promoting enterprise among the subsistence sector, they want these guys to shut down their shops and become employees of walmart, etc or just get lost! It’s like saying to the subsistence retailers, ‘ We don’t like your filthy stores, take up a job or just get lost!’…beneficiaries: the government, middle class consumers and big farmers….loser: everyone else ( certainly the majority of India…
Truth be told, 99 times out of 100, these guys have fresher vegetables and fruits than any retail giant. Other advantages of street vendors are:
* giving credit to neighbourhood homeowners
* deliver door-to-door
* take requests for hard-to-find produce
* guarantee quality (freshness, sweetness, no worms, etc.) or money back
It would be a real shame to see them go.
Well, it is quite tempting to give in to the ‘they took our jobs’ current that seems to have taken our collective psyche by storm. In the spirit of equitable representation and for the sake of a balanced argument, I would like to list the disadvantages of Subziwallahs:
1. terrible hygiene. They scratch all over their body and never bother to wash their hands with soap etc. They use those hands to handle our veggies.
2. terrible hygiene again. Did I mention the water they use to ‘wash’ the veggies? It is a bacterial soup that gives many a child stomachaches. Then there is the dirty ‘taat'(cloth made of jute) they use to cover produce. Crawling with little critters eager to get into our systems.
3. uncertain provenance. While fawning over the subziwallah bhaiyya, remember that produce being so lovingly sold to you may very well have been grown near( or upon) a landfill, an industrial wasteland or a dumping site. You may have observed how they use the banks of the toxic Yamuna for the cultivation of veggies. Well, imagine the levels of toxicity in the resulting produce. Moreover, they use what I like to call ‘insaani khaad’ ( humanure)- which is of course a euphemism for feces. I have observed all the aforementioned practices on the outskirts of Delhi and on the banks of Yamuna maiyya. Most Subziwallahs carry these tainted items ( usually leafy vegetables which are easy to grow but perish quickly).
Bad hygiene and pollutants are very real problems, but we can work through them without forcing subziwallahs to cease to exist.
really? can we? it shall require a revolution of an epic proportion!
Then there is the consideration of the utter wastage that results due to imperfect systems of storage ( if any) and transport. More than 30% of all fruits and vegetables produced in our nation goes to waste simply because Sabziwallahs and sundry middlemen do not have the requisite means to handle and preserve large amounts of produce. Imagine….30% being rendered worthless….in a nation where people starve to death for the want of food!
This agitation we see is essentially an act engendered by middlemen and traders out of a growing concern for their profits. For farmers , FDI shall mean better prices. For us, the consumers, it shall result in better quality, hygienic and standardized products. The concerns of 5 million traders cannot be allowed trump the welfare of 1200 million farmers and consumers.
It is indeed a sordid chain that links every Sabziwallah to a number of middlemen. The middlemen go out of business, the Sabziwallah follows suit. It is a sad prospect for street vendors. However, it is unavoidable if we aspire for the betterment of both the farmers and the consumers.
That shows your lack of understanding. FDI in retail will not mean better prices. They’ll still need an APMC license to purchase fruits and vegetables. That is not liberalised yet. This should have been done first. Then even Indian companies could have set up cold chains, eliminated middle men, yada yada… Why do you think only FOREIGN investment can lead to lower prices and less waste?? Why can’t DOMESTIC investment do that?
By ‘better prices’ I of course mean the remunerative prices secured after the elimination of exploitative middlemen. The farmer and the sabziwallah are separated by a continuum of middlemen. This soaks up a large sum.
Also,sourcing of a minimum of 30% from Indian micro and small industry is mandatory. This will provide the scales to encourage domestic value addition and manufacturing, thereby creating a multiplier effect for employment, technology upgradation and income generation.
The following is a part of the pro-FDI argument:
“Policy mandates a minimum investment of $100 million with at least half the amount to be invested in back-end infrastructure, including cold chains, refrigeration, transportation, packing, sorting and processing. This is expected to considerably reduce post-harvest losses.
This will have a salutary impact on food inflation from efficiencies in supply chain. This is also because food, which perishes due to inadequate infrastructure, will not be wasted.
A strong legal framework in the form of the Competition Commission is available to deal with any anti-competitive practices, including predatory pricing.
Stores like Wal-Mart or Tesco are by definition few, on the outskirts of cities (to keep real estate costs low), and can’t intrude into the territory of local kiranas. So, how will they gobble up the local guy? Secondly, it can’t be anyone’s case that farmers are getting a good deal right now. The fact is that farmers barely subsist while middlemen take the cream. Let’s not get dreamy about this unequal relationship.”
I agree with Naushirvan that “farmers barely subsist while middlemen take the cream.” That said, after Walmart etc. enter the Indian market, farmers will still barely subsist, the middlemen will be mostly out of work and therefore enhance the poverty base of the country, and politicians will get more bribes more easily from the few owners and operators of Walmart.
The ranks of the poor will swell. The ranks of lobbyists will also swell. And so will the pocketbooks of politicians and upper-level bureaucrats, because the giving and taking of bribes will become partly legal and wholly efficient.
The best part of today’s subzi distribution network — 30% spoilage notwithstanding — is that a huge sector of the economy remains outside the scope of money-grubbing politicians and their cronies.
Sadly, what you say is true. However, it was my duty to present ‘the government’s perspective’ and play the devil’s advocate. In a sane, modern and intellectually balanced discussion, in order to rid ourselves of insular prejudice, we must always consider arguments of the opposition. That is something I gathered from the works of Bertrand Russell.
I have lived in the US for 32 years. The coming of Walmart etc. is initially wonderful, but then it siphons money to China, and turns risk-taking local businesspeople into wage-earners as cashiers and greeters. Within a few years, more people slide into poverty, people like me become richer (I am a professor), people richer than me become super-rich, the overall taxbase to support local governments shrinks, and the local and global politics comes into the control of an oligarchy.
It would be fair to say that US democracy began to undevelop during the Reagan years.
But I have faith in the internet. Satyameva jayate. “Trees have been known to move, stones to speak”.