By Sreekumar Raghavan
Many professionals update their knowledge by attending conferences and continuing education programmes. I don’t know how many journalists atleast update their knowledge in the areas they are covering. Even when covering conferences and summits, the scribes just take off after jotting what the chief guest said or the person who delivers the keynote. If the inauguration is done by a Minister, the entire news value of the function begins and ends there. You will find the media chairs empty as soon as the Minister leaves.

I found out recently at FRO2008, a Franchising and retailing event organized by Franchise India Holdings Ltd and Indian Franchise Association in Bangalore that it pays to remain there and listen to various presentations although I found difficult to keep myself awake especially in the post-lunch session.

When Infosys launched a software product called “ShoppingTrip 360 platform” sometime back, to enable consumer products goods companies (CPGs) to gain visibility in large malls, I felt they were ignoring the small kiranas and mandis in favour of large malls which have the money and resources to sell more.

These concerns were expressed in a piece I wrote in these columns, titled, “Enabling IT to reform kiranas and mandis” which exhorted the IT industry to also develop solutions to reform our small kiranas and mandis- for the common man still depends on it to buy his daily needs. 

But I found out from interactions with IT experts at FRO2008 and also from their presentations that several attempts were indeed made by the likes of Microsoft to reform mandis. For example, Microsoft’s attempt to reform mandis in Delhi turned out to be a failure for various reasons, prime among them being that traders themselves refused to co-operate.

In an interesting oral presentation by Kumar Vembu who works for a firm appropriately called GoFrugal, it was said that his company had visited as many as 2.5 lakh small retailers in an effort to market IT solutions. According to Vembu, for a small businessman the shop or kirana he owns is his entire business and livelihood. If one were to ask him to spend heavily on IT implementation, he might very well say, I don’t need your software to understand my customers! Also the small retailer doesn’t know what his problems are, the way the IT people speak.

Interestingly, the aversion to IT implementation by small and medium businesses has not deterred the global leader Tata Consultancy Services from launching a SMB business in March 2008. Venguswamy Ramaswamy,who heads the division, believes that the process of outsourcing and pay-by-use model could enable SMBs to adopt IT to further their business prospects.

Instead of asking them to make a huge capital investment upfront, TCS proposes to levy a monthly charge from the shops for running their backend and IT implementation. It is not without any reason that TCS has ventured into SMB segment. According to Ramaswamy, it is a huge business opportunity—a sizeable chunk of retail business is still in the small and medium segment.

So with pleasure I withdraw my allegation that IT majors haven’t done anything to reform the small kiranas or mandis. Thanks to FRO 2008. On a positive note, it can be said that the days of the small retailer is not yet over, perhaps, it will never be. He has unique strengths and market knowledge which the retail giants lack. The small kirana and the local mandis are here to stay anyway despite large IT investments retail giants might make to get more customers.

But the local kiranas and mandis can do a better job with a dose of reform, if IT helps, why not?