ITC and Reliance have already launched projects to recruit street hawkers, the main adversaries of big retail. And now Bharti Mittal has opened a retail innings of its chain, Easy Day, in Ludhiana with something similar.
Bharti Retail Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bharti Enterprises, recently launched its first three EasyDay neighbourhood outlets at Ludhiana in Punjab and the people selling the wares are virtually people from the neighbourhood.
The chain has hired meat sellers, fruits and vegetable vendors, housewives, retired people, rural population, physically challenged individuals and youth as part of their sales team.
A spokesman for Bharti Retail said the company was committed to inclusive growth where ever its stores operate so that members of the community where the company operates, benefit from this business.
The company is also imparting intensive and structured education on retail industry not only to physically challenged individuals at the Bharti Academy of Retail, but also training people thus far considered outside the range of employability.
The spokesman added Bharti Retail would initially focus on Punjab as the company would consolidate its presence in one market, before expanding to another region. He added Bharti retail has earmarked an investment close to Rs 200-250 crore (Rs 2-2.5 billion) by 2015 for its pan-India operations.
Dharmender Kumar, director, India FDI Watch, says the recruitment of a handful of handicapped persons or street vendors was only an eyewash, unless the retail industry discloses the percentage of people it employs from these categories.
Just one of 1,000 workers would be a street vendor or a retired person, but organisations try to get the maximum publicity for this. The idea is just to make opposition ineffective and not to save street vendors from unemployment, he adds.
Last year, ITC launched its model of inclusive retail with 150 pushcarts given to street vendors under its Choupal Fresh retail scheme.The strategy was to get headload vendors to sell items on-push carts provided by the company with finance and produce coming from ITC. The scheme also had frachisee provisions.
"ITC had to withdraw the scheme the project after a few weeks. If the companies are really honest about helping hawkers or other marginalised sections, then they should come out with the exact number of such people working in their stores," says Kumar.
ITC officials refused to comment on the matter, while admitting that the scheme was no longer in existence.