India resists the supermarket trend

By PETER POPHAM

DELHI - One of the charms of living in India is that there are no supermarkets. I don't know why there aren't: in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan the supermarket idea has taken root, same as the rest of the world.

They may not have giant super-malls with creches and exotic cheese and all-night opening, but the germ has landed, the soil is ripe: all products available under one roof and one management; bright lights, trolleys, check-out desks, orderly queues; even barcode readers.

The barcode revolution has yet to hit Delhi; in most places, they haven't even got round to cash registers. A simple desk drawer is preferred, with a key; or simpler still, an inside pocket.

Supermarkets likewise: instead of a big hall divided by product lines, you get small grocery shops, piled high with everything. You read down your list and the assistants scamper up and down ladders. The good old days.

You would guess that this is all about to change. Ten years ago India set a first trembling foot on the road to economic liberalisation, and began to dismantle the "licence raj" that had controlled all economic activity until then.

This April, complying with World Trade Organization rules, India removed the last 715 items, from imported apples to imported washing machines, on which it had imposed "quantitative restrictions" or QRs, which made it necessary for traders to have a special licence before they could import them. India is now a free trade country, or heading that way. Supermarkets must surely follow.

Or so you would think. And change in some areas has been blinding. Only four years ago, the capital's roads were still dominated by the Hindustan Ambassador, the locally made version of the 1950s Morris Oxford, a typical product of the licence raj. But month by month they get more like the roads of any other country, as the made-in-India Hyundais, Fords, Fiats and Toyotas roll out of the sheds.

In other sectors, however, India shows a stubborn disinclination to change at all. If state socialism was good enough for Joe Stalin, it's good enough for them. And weirdly, the best place in the capital to get a whiff of that spirit is also the only place I know where you can find supermarket trolleys.

It is safe to say that Super Bazar in Connaught Place, New Delhi's oldest shopping district, has seen better days. Twenty-five years ago it was a bold initiative: India marching into the future, with an up-to-the-minute shopping centre, all life's necessities brought together under one roof, and on the ground floor a supermarket! Like many brave initiatives in the Indian capital, it has been mouldering ever since.

Super Bazar is housed in a discoloured concrete stump. Khaki-clad security men loaf around the metal detector at the entrance. And there is the supermarket. Four of the checkouts are manned - no bar code readers, but proper tills. Huddled at the side, small, rusting trolleys await customers but it seems they will be waiting for some time. Customers are what Super Bazar conspicuously lacks.

A stroll along the aisles explains why: the selections of goods, all made in India, is pathetic. There are the awful local biscuits ("Eat Healthy, Think Better"), orange squash the colour of napalm, large plastic jars of Indian tea. A spasm of liberalisation, or a dollop of baksheesh, has produced an illuminated showcase full of advertising material for Nescafe. But there is no Nescafe on the shelves.

So despite the trolleys and the tills, Delhi's only supermarket is almost empty. Because Indian consumers are not fools: they know they can get a far better range of products at the cramped and old-fashioned grocer's in the neighbourhood, where they simply bark out the order and in no time it is bagged and ready. It is refreshing to find one corner of the world where the supermarket experience has gone down like a lead balloon.

Most of Super Bazar's othe salesfloors are occupied by "Government undertakings", the outlets of state-run enterprises, if that's the right word, turning out shoes, suitcases, filing cabinets, steel desks, chinaware, garments.

These are India's sick industries, ever more grudgingly propped up by the taxpayer, and it is as if they have been herded into this terrible place to die, amid the grime, the betel spurtings, the ancient dust.

Business is slack, permanently slack; once in a while the staff drop everything and go off to attend a union meeting. Customers are few, and it's not hard to work out why: as soon as one gets through the metal detector, or even before, one is seized by a terrible mood of dejection that won't let go. Everyone here has a hangdog air. They look as if they are waiting to be gassed.

The sad thing is that some of the things for sale are halfway all right, and if they hadn't been cocooned away from competition all these years they might, in a market as big as India's, be prospering. Take the chinaware. India makes tolerable porcelain - but so poorly designed that the teapot lids fall off when you pour, the cups rattle, the floral designs haven not been changed since 1955. A quick shot of electricity and firms like this could flourish . But it doesn't arrive.

As economic liberalism is the tune India has been marching to for ten years, it is pretty astounding that Super Bazar still survives. Or is it? In simpler, more disciplined countries, the idea of economic liberalism, which wraps corporate profits, consumer satisfaction and the approval of the rest of the world in one glittering package, has taken over without a fight.

But as all the businessmen who have attempted to make money here find out sooner or later, India is not like that.

India may describe itself as a Union, but in fact it is a thousand or ten thousand or a million jealous fiefdoms, each guarding its own territory and privileges and exacting its own informal taxes.

So even Super Bazar may be safe for another decade or two, despite the sloth, the air of terminal sickness; while the trolleys rust away.

- INDEPENDENT