With the country’s budding organised retail sector facing growing dissent from local traders for allegedly eating into neighbourhood mom & pop stores’ market share and profit pie, some of the majors like Kishore Biyani’s Pantaloon Retail and Subhiksha Trading Services have started offering baits to mend fences with the ‘small fish’. They are making concerted efforts to involve small shops in the overall organised retail process in a bid to convince state governments, some of which have already slapped restrictions on the entry of big retail, that their expansion will be a positive sum game in which existing unorganised sector participants, too, have an economically viable role to play. Pantaloon Retail, one of India’s largest organised sector players, has concessionaires in its outlets which it sublets to small retailers. “We have offered space within our outlets to local mandi operators in six of our stores in Mumbai. We intend to replicate this in our other stores as well,” informed Future Retail CEO Rakesh Biyani.

Similarly, Vishal Retail, as part of its plans to invest Rs 450 crore by the year-end for capex, has decided to franchise its branded retail outlets to kirana shop owners. “We have started the process of identifying mom & pop stores willing to become franchisees for our retail chain. A team of five-six members has been formed to scout for such potential partners in Delhi,” said Vishal Retail Ltd CMD Ram Chandra Agarwal. This model was pioneered by Subhiksha Trading Services, which had launched a massive expansion drive and now has 1,200 stores across the country.

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