A Hot Topic

Rediff.com, a leading Indian website, reprinted my Forbes.com column on Wal-Mart and India on Wednesday. So far there are 213 comments, some impassioned and most quite thoughtful pro and con.

Here's the Rediff pickup and comments.

I've been getting a lot of emails. which is great, but I would appreciate it if people would post their views here, or in the comments section of this item. That way your views can be heard by everybody.

UPDATE: Oddly, the comments section to the Rediff article was deleted. That seems to be the website's policy. Oh well. A lot of the commentswere pretty good, and I'd have liked to see them retained.

Here is another blog reaction which I though made some good points. Just to address one point that this gent makes: my use of the term "bazaars" was not to imply anything exotic. That just happens to be the Hindi word for markets.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Bring Out the Brickbats, Folks

My latest Forbes.com column is on Wal-Mart in India, the one subject that in the past has yielded uniformly negative feedback.

Really. Not one favorable comment.

Go ahead... fire away!

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

India's Fight Against Wal-Mart Begins

As is hardly surprising, protests have commenced over Wal-Mart's move into India -- and what you see on the left is just a sample of things to come.

See this article in The Hindu. “We believe Wal-Mart is going to ruin this country and millions of people will lose their jobs,” one protest organizer told the New York Times.

He's right. Don't be gulled by the Times's description of the protest coalition as a "coalition of trade unions, traders, students and communist parties." In the U.S., such demonstrations could be easily dismissed. In India, those are mainstream forces, and are taken very seriously by the Congress-led government.

Here is the website of the FDI-Watch anti-Wal-Mart coalition. The website makes some very good points about the impact of foreign direct investment on the Indian retail sector, and on Indian society as a whole.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

More Big Boxes for India

There's an old saying about India, one that Indians sometimes recite in talking with furungis: "Big country, big problems." True enough. But I've never understood is why India sometimes compounds its own problems, such as by, for example, allowing Wal-Mart of all things into the country.

Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Wal-Mart's plans to blitz India are moving ahead, despite its potentially devastating impact on the millions of small, mostly poor shopkeepers in that country. I explained in a previous item what a really dreadful idea this is. In a country with no social safety net, big-box retailers could mean starvation for small store owners driven out of business.

Wal-Mart's Indian partner addresses this obvious concern as follows, according to the Journal:

Rajan Bharti Mittal, joint managing director of Bharti Enterprises, which owns Bharti Retail, emphasized at a news conference that the Indian company would own the new stores and would seek to help small farmers link into its new supply chain.

Isn't that just ducky? Indian farmers, who are driven to suicide by economic pressures, would now enjoy the fruits of Wal-Mart's notoriously cut-throat buying practices!

In the U.S., Wal-Mart pays lip service to lessening its devastating impact on local economies, such as by engaging in PR initiatives. With the exception of nonsense like Bharti's "farmers will love this" statement above, the Indian enterprise makes no effort to mask the havoc it will wreak.

It will be interesting to see if the Indian people are able to stop the Wal-Mart steamroller.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.

Wal-Mart's De-Employment Program For India

Word is spreading through the galaxy today about what must surely be one of the most awful ideas of recent history -- a plan to set up Wal-Mart superstores in India, of all places. Here's a Reuters story on the subject.

As anyone who has been there for more than thirty minutes can attest, if there is one thing that India doesn't need it is more stores. Since its many thousands of shops are a path to upward mobility for even the poorest Indians, Wal-Mart's arrival would be devastating. It would be nothing less than a massive de-employment program.

As I pointed out in my column a couple of weeks ago, when Indians are pushed up against the wall, violence can erupt. Delhi merchants have taken to the streets because of a plan to shutter many of their shops, and civil disobedience (or worse) is more likely than not if Wal-Mart arrives.

One report today says that the deal has been sucked into a "political whirlpool." Left-wing parties, "which provide crucial support to the Congress-led UPA government, asked trade unions to launch a nationwide action against the entry of Wal-Mart and other multinational retailers into the domestic market."

Hopefully this terrible idea will be protested peacefully, then consumed by India's legendary red tape, and then die a quiet death.


© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

-----------

Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.