The decision taken by the Union cabinet on November 24, to permit foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail chain companies in India with a controlling 51 percent equity shareholding is long overdue. The impact of this historic decision, over which successive governments in New Delhi have been dithering for two decades, is that Western retail chains such as Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco will be permitted to establish supermarkets vending a wide spectrum of goods ranging from farm produce to fast moving consumer goods including garments, footwear and haberdashery. Since these billion-dollar retail giants buy in bulk, they are able to negotiate rock-bottom purchase prices with manufacturers and suppliers, and pass on the economies of scale to consumers.
Benefits to consumers apart, the most compelling argument for FDI in multi-brand retail is that Western-style supermarkets tend to stock and sell farm fresh produce and processed foods in a big way, and are big buyers of agricultural produce. Therefore they build storage, logistics, packaging and delivery infrastructure to get high-quality agriculture produce expeditiously and efficiently from farm to urban markets.
Curiously, despite the proven benefits of multi-brand mass retail, for almost half a century there’s been stiff resistance to it in post-independence India. Rooted in small-is-beautiful romanticism and elitist notions about the health-giving importance of unprocessed farm produce, persistent opposition to modern retail has extracted a terrible price from the nation’s neglected rural majority who despite constituting 67 percent of the country’s population, contribute a mere 17 percent of India’s annual GDP. With amateur middlemen dominating agriculture under the umbrella of the iniquitous Agriculture Produce Marketing Committees (APMC) Act, 1954 which mandates compulsory auction of horticulture produce through APMCs, it’s hardly surprising that 40 percent of horticulture and 10-20 percent of foodgrains produced by rural India is wasted or damaged inflicting a loss of Rs.50,000 crore annually to the Indian economy.
Unsurprisingly, the stiffest opposition to FDI in multi-brand retail comes from the Communist Party of India-Marxist with the BJP also raising the bogey of local kirana stores going under against foreign competition. In this context, it’s pertinent to note that communist parties world over have had little sympathy for rural producers. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, Josef Stalin had over 5 million agriculturists executed for opposing his forced collectivisation programme; and Chairman Mao starved over 30 million Chinese farmers to death during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution eras of 1958-66, to keep industrial workers supplied with cheap agricultural produce.
Likewise, preoccupied with representing the interests of industrial workers, the CPM abhors the idea of peasants getting better prices for their produce. Ditto the BJP which seems to prefer shopkeepers slaving all day in dingy kirana stores rather than working for decent wages and salaries in modern supermarkets. Both absurd interpretations of the national interest.
Citizens have vested interest in media freedom
It’s an ominous portent for the future of India’s democracy. The media is squarely within the crosshairs of the establishment. There can be no other interpretation of the unprecedented damages of Rs.100 crore awarded by a judge of the Pune district court in November 2008 — and substantially upheld by the Bombay high court and Supreme Court — to Justice P.B. Sawant, a former Supreme Court judge and chairman of the Press Council of India, in a defamation case he filed against the television news channel Times Now. Justice Sawant’s grievance was that his photograph had been wrongly projected in a brief Times Now news broadcast on September 10, 2008 implicating him in a provident funds scam in which several higher court judges are involved. The news channel’s defence that it had inadvertently mixed up its photographs and had immediately broadcast a corrigendum — which was repeated five times on the day — cut no ice with the Bombay high court and Supreme Court.
That there is deep even if subconscious, establishment prejudice against contemporary India’s uncomfortably free press and the broadcast media, which have been relentlessly exposing political and official corruption and misgovernance, is also evidenced by government insistence on applying provisions of the Working Journalists and other Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous Provision Act, 1955 under which a statutorily-appointed board headed by a former higher judiciary judge, determines the wages payable by newspapers and other print media to journalists and staff. The plain intent behind government insistence on implementing this archaic legislation is to divide publishers, journalists and employees, bankrupt newspapers and/or diminish their capability to fund news gathering and investigation.
Read together with the scathing criticism of journalists and the media by Justice M. Katju, the newly appointed chairman of the Press Council of India who recently questioned the education, competence, and lot else of media professionals, the unprecedented penalty imposed by the Pune district court on Times Now and its endorsement by the Bombay high and Supreme Court is clear indication that the judiciary — which should be actively protecting the freedom of the press and media — has turned hostile and seems to be making common cause with the neta-babu kleptocracy which has every reason to fear India’s free and vibrant media.
Against this backdrop of the establishment ganging up to disable the media, the onus is on right-thinking members of society and the educated middle class who are the prime beneficiaries of the country’s free media, to speak up and defend the fourth estate. As fortunate readers of the world’s cheapest newspapers and magazines, Indian citizens have a vested interest in the country’s free and independent media which is the envy of all nations worldwide, for its unsparing exposure and criticism of this struggling nation’s neta-babu kleptocracy and other anti-socials betraying their oaths of office and the public interest. If this last bastion of democracy falls because of the machinations of a self-serving establishment, the public will have only itself to blame.