Walmart is planning to provide employment to 30,000 to 35,000 persons in Maharashtra over the next five years. It is also planning to open 13 more stores in the State, said Krish Iyer, President and CEO of India operations.
The company has already set up stores in Amravati and Aurangabad in northern Maharashtra.
50 new stores
Interacting with the media on the sidelines of State of Maharashtra’s Agribusiness and Rural Transformation (SMART) event, Iyer said the overall country plan is on track and the company has already signed up for 24 stores in the country. At the pan-India level, it is targeting to open 50 stores in the next five to seven years. Each store will require about $10-million investment, he said.
He pointed out that the company currently has a strategy, which is more tuned towards tier-2 cities as it offers a good opportunity to serve the kirana stores as well as sourcing agri-products from the rural markets. Walmart wants to work with the farmers as well as to provide the goods at lower prices to consumers. It can achieve this by helping framers reduce wastage of crops. The company will also directly source the goods from the farmers, which will reduce market intermediaries, he said.
Iyer said that horticulture crops such as strawberry, pomegranate and grapes from Maharashtra is a great opportunity for the company and it has deployed manpower on the ground to help with capacity building for farmers.
World Bank project
SMART is a World Bank assisted project to revamp the agricultural value chain in the State with a focus on marginal farmers with small land holdings across 1,000 villages. It will be scaled up to 10,000 villages across the State later on.
The project will entail an investment of $300 million, of which World Bank will contribute $210 million while the State government will contribute $80 million. The remaining $10 million will come from Village Social Transformation Foundation, which is a Maharashtra government initiative along with the corporate sector.