30 Nov 2011 - QA 3

There is a lot of talk on FDIs in retail. Please give your views on that.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: If you travel around the world, whether the East or West, from Malaysia to Argentina you find only these multi-national chains of shops all over the place, like Walmart, 7-Eleven. These stores are there from Japan to Argentina. It is only in India there is some breathing space. In China and India it is a little different.
You come to India and you find all these different stores with different name, some local and some national shops. Of course India is a very big market so many of these big stores wants to come and open shops here but we should study before opening these. We need to study as to how adversely it might affect the economy and the small shops here.
I was told in Delhi all the big malls got shut down because people don’t go there. They prefer to go to small shops. So one view is, so what if we open these big stores anyways nobody will go. People will go to their small shops. You cannot use this logic before you take a step like this because once you take such a step there is no going back on it.
This should be studied and hasty decisions should not be made.
With the nuclear agreement itself there are a lot of issues and serious concerns that our scientists have put forward which the government has not addressed.