FDI in retails: Some Facts

The revenue of Wal-Mart is 605 billion $ and India’s retails business is of range 609 billion $.  The Wal-Mart employee’s 1 million people for its entire business and India have around 70.48 million people associated with it. So does it mean for every 1 job Wall-Mart created in India, 70 will lose their job?
This line is especially blinking on social media sites and fears are made by some anti-social elements that the entry of foreign retail players like Wal-Mart will destroy the Indian Retail market and they will be the only place where consumers will shift their focus for buying day to day products. Will it really happen my friends? The shouts are made on Chinese cheaper goods and vegetables will be flooded into these supermarkets and Indians have no choice.
The existing Bharti Wal-Mart imports 3% of its goods, sourcing 97% indigenously. The present import duties, countervailing duties, shipping costs make imports uneconomic save for a supermarket goods, such as plastic toy. India shopkeepers can freely import the Chinese plastic toys, but they do it on a fraction only, not because of chauvinism boycotting foreign products, because they are profit seekers and don’t find much profit on Chinese items.
We must accept the fact that if we lags some expertise on certain fields then we must come up ahead and enhance our skills or import those technologies to set ourselves globally competitive. The self sufficiency is an old saga. Like the increase in the import duties on foreign products from few % to 300%, till the crises of 1991 has not resulted into faster economic growth. In fact it killed the competition, created monopoly. So for a phone connection, Scooter, cars like ambassadors the common man has to wait for years. The growth in GDP was a meagerly 3.5%.  The number of poor people doubled.
What happened after 1991 is now the well-known story. The computers were costs there times post import substitution area. This held back software and BPO development. India’s Software and BPO exports only accelerated when computer cost came down. When import duties were first slashed in 1991 critics were made in same that Indian Industry will be killed. In fact, industry thrived never as before, both in domestic and export production. Merchandise production was growing from 5% of GDP 1991 to around 15% today. India is emerged as global manufacturing hub. Global auto companies are shipping their vehicles from India to outside world. Even Indians are affording the foreign cars. Their Indian counterparts are also set themselves on global status taking control of companies such as JLR. Freely allowing foreign competition simply created thousand of supplier to these global auto companies opening new era of manufacturing. Wal-Mart, Ikea, Carrefor will do in same way. They will interact with Indian suppliers and make them world class exporter. Foreign retail chains will devise their ways for their suppliers to combine cheap imported inputs with domestic one to produce world class goods. And competing with them the Indian retailers will do something similar.