Real India Retailing

ust a few months as head of Bharti Retail’s four easyday stores in Sangrur and Patiala, and she’s already a ‘mother figure’ to her colleagues. Managing a 60-strong team of college- and school-dropouts, retirees, housewives, the physically challenged and fruit and vegetable cart sellers (some of them working part-time) is a challenge. But the fresh MBA takes it in her stride and has been running one of the most successful clusters for her company, managing everything in operations—including ordering products for the stores, marketing, tie-ups, finance and human resource—for the stores under her.

A typical day begins with an update on the family matters of her store employees—someone’s ailing grandfather, another’s school-going children and a third’s health—before getting down to brass tacks. This is because a strong emotional connect lies at the core of motivating the workforce in small-town India. “If you do not connect with them at a personal level, you will remain their boss,” she says. “You cannot run the business like a family.”

Despite a cosmopolitan upbringing in Mumbai, Pragya always wanted a setting like this with an aim to get into the retail sector after her MBA. Indian business schools, she says, do not properly orient students for Indian markets, leave alone small-town or rural markets. Most of the curriculum is based on US references; case studies are all US-based. To break this jinx, Pragya studied about the Indian market and small towns through her best aid: Google. Now, she’s getting to write her own “real India” case studies.