Mr. Kishore Biyani
Managing Director, Pantaloon Retail (India) Limited
 
Good afternoon, my view is quite different in terms of government, being a retailer I think the government has met retailers form the world but I don’t think the government has met any Indian retailer till today. I believe that India was created in 1947 in a very different environment at a different time in a different way. I think we have reached a long way in getting the paper industry, the textile industry, the sugar industry, the basic infrastructure industry I believe the next round of economic development in this country can happen out of consumption so I think the government needs to play a role of re-looking at themselves absolutely , look at creating a scenario planning exercise of how the whole economy will unfold looking at the 1.2 billion customers which we have in this country, how we can increase consumption, how we will drive growth which will adapt to the consumption. I don’t agree to the seminar global brands, why can’t we first increase consumption in India, I don’t know why we subsidise exports, why do we want to create everything for the export market. We are not doing anything for this country, we are not doing anything in terms of increasing consumption, rising of infrastructure, look at the mobile phones, ---call blocks happening now because the capacities are jammed. We used to reach one hour to my place, we build fly-overs and we it takes one hour 30 minutes in much better cars now. Just because the roads are jammed. We used to stand in the bus queues earlier, now we stand in the queues at the airport; we never reach on time so we are a nation who has never planned for the future. We have never created infrastructure, we have never created any scenarios and whatever scenarios we are creating today they are made out of textbooks in 1940-50s which were written in some countries,. I believe that most of the economists in our country were born in some era, some time an I don’t think there is any relevant ---by any means so we believe that we need a new level of thinking, a new level of scenario planning exercise in terms of how we want to shape up this country which is going to emerge because we are the last leg of the consumers left. And the whole world is looking at India but unfortunately we don’t look at India ourselves. Thank you.
 
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