FDI in Retail a Self Goal

Over two decades of the neo-liberal policies have further intensified our chronic poverty and imposed a severe livelihood crisis on nearly one billion socially excluded Indians. The project wholesale globalization has become its own victim as seen in massive and unsustainable current account deficit, reckless inflation, decline of the external value of the Rupee and loss of confidence by the foreign investors in India policy regime. Even India's own companies are happier investing abroad than in India. The irony is enhanced as a way-out of the blind alley has been sought in throwing open even the retail trade sector to displacement investment by the biggest MNC retailers. We have succumbed to their lobbying and the entire policy space has been spread before them to freely write the policy script by way of pre-conditions for entry and subsequent regulation. It is a sad story of going beyond free markets and self-regulation. It robs the adversely included scores of millions of Indian penny capitalist small traders and hawkers of their toehold in the economy. Thus the global super rich, the 0.1 percent at the top, have subverted both our 'democracy and development', courtesy cronies in government and the Indian corporate houses. The wooing of FDI in retail on the latter's terms is nothing but a case of self-goal. The book examines this question in a broad socio-economic and political framework and shows how the neo-liberal establishment considers no price too high to accomplish its partisan agenda. Debunking the TINA syndrome, the book advances some alternatives to the disastrous policy of opening up retail trade to the most nefarious retail MNCs.

A political economist and publicist engaged over the last five decades in research, teaching, consultancy and writings, Prof Kamal Nayan Kabra is Malcolm S. Adiseshiah Chair Professor, Economics of Development and Decentralized Planning, Institute of Social Sciences. Formerly Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, he was the first Nehru Memorial Trust UK Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He has been the chairperson of several committees including the one set up to review the working of the Forward Markets. He was also a Director of Food Corporation of India. His publications include Appropriate DevelopmentPeople First; The Political Economy of Brain Drain; Black Economy in India: Problem and Policies; Development Planning in India: Exploring an Alternative Approach; Political Economy of Policy Options: Nationalizations in India; High Growth, Rising Inequalities, Worsening Poverty: India's 'Development' Experience. Also publishes regularly in Hindi on the political economy of development, public policies and globalization, Among several books in Hindi, the latest one is Khudara Vyapar Mein FDI.