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The banks know your customer (KYC) norms require proof of address, PAN cards, proof of date of birth everything but her dogs surname. She has no chance of getting this kind of KYC done. Large companies get loan rates below the prime lending rate, but my vegetable vendor gets it at 0.5% per day. They have to return 50 paise at the end of the day for every Rs100 borrowed in the morning. This will work out to be more than 180% per annum. My retail provision stores man gets his money in an interesting way. He gets Rs45,000 (for a loan amount of Rs50,000) upfront and pays Rs500 a day for 100 days to repay his full Rs50,000. It turns out to be more than 10% for three months. More than 70% of the working capital requirements of retail trade in 2009-2010 came from non-bank sources. The other perennial problem faced by the unorganised retail trade is the organised dacoity by minions of the state. They need to bribe the cops, bribe the municipal authorities and other local goons. The cost can be as high as Rs20 on an income of Rs200 or so per day. That is 10% of gross income. The same is true of fruit seller, the fast-food idli joint or the beauty parlour. Instead of looking at these two important constraints imposed on the fastest-growing and most productive and efficient retail trade, our planners want to open the field up for global sharks in the name of liberalisation. For anything and everything the policymaker wants Indians to emulate the Japanese, the French, the Germans or the South Koreans. All petroleum services and products, rice, tobacco, salt, alcoholic beverages and fresh food traded at public markets are excluded in Japan from any distributional aspect by foreign companies. The French simply restrict any development of hypermarkets to protect what they call centres of French towns and villages and the livelihoods of small shopkeepers. Germany has legislative constraints on outlets above 1,200 sq m. This is despite trade constituting a relatively small portion of their economy both in terms of employment and value addition compared to India. The paan-chewing, dhoti-clad, English-ignorant retail trader should not be seen as an inefficient entrepreneur who needs to be bleached by globally-accepted detergents. What he needs is a level playing field, in the full sense of the term, with access to affordable credit and the abolition of inspector raj in the form of harassment by various arms of the government. We are still a savings-based, family-oriented economy. The sooner we have a ministry of retail trade to protect, preserve and enhance the capabilities of our kirana stores the better for the Indian economy.