One Person Company (OPC) - The new business format for small retailers in India
The retail sector in India is undergoing transformation due to the changing lifestyle of people. The sector is generally characterised by small retailers who conduct business in a traditional manner. But recently there has been a shift towards modern retailing, since education and exposure to contemporary trends have made the Indian consumer look for more professionalism in shopping. This has prompted many corporations (both Indian and foreign) to enter into this sector with the modern retail formats, such as supermarkets, department stores, shopping malls etc. This trend towards organized retailing can be a threat for small retailers. This article discusses One Person Company concept as a strategy to develop small retail businesses in terms of their corporate status.1. INTRODUCTIONThe retail industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in India. It accounts for over 20% of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and contributes 8% to total employment (Thambala, 2013). It is currently estimated at around US$490 billion and is projected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6 % to reach US$865 billion by 2023 (India Brand Equity Foundation, 2014). India is the 5th largest retail market in the world and the country ranks fourth among the 30 surveyed countries in terms of global retail development (Retailing Sector Analysis Report, 2013). The retail industry comprises of different segments like food and grocery, clothing and textiles, consumer durables, footwear, furniture and furnishings, catering services, jewelry and watches, books, music and gifts, mobile handsets and others. Food and groceries is the largest category within the retail sector with 60 % share followed by the apparel and mobile segments (Indian Retail Sector: Industry Profile, 2012).The retail industry in India is broadly classified into organized and unorganized segments. Organized retailing refers to modern retailing with multi-storied shopping malls, plazas and huge complexes that offer a large variety of products in terms of quality and price, while the unorganized retailing refers to traditional retailing through small shops. In India, the unorganized segment is very large (92%) and dominates the Indian retail market (Deloitte, 2013). It is expected to grow by 5% and reach US$650 billion by 2020 (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce). This segment is generally characterized by small retailers such as owner-operated general stores, convenience stores, kirana shops, street vendors, etc. The sole proprietorship is a common form of business in the unorganized segment. As of 2013, India's retailing industry was essentially owner-manned small shops. The larger format convenience stores and supermarkets are present only in large urban centers in India. In 2010, they accounted only for about 4 % of the industry (Accha, 2013). But in recent years there has been a shift towards organized retailing in India, largely due to increased purchasing power, exposure to western culture, brand awareness, growing middle class and the creation of nuclear families (Handa & Grover, 2012). The growing demand for organized retailing has attracted many corporations into this sector. Large business tycoons, such as the Tata group, the Aditya Birla Group, Reliance Communications etc. have entered into this sector. Indian retail sector has been attracting foreign retailers too. The Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy on retail has facilitated foreign retail companies to enter the country. This has created an upheaval among small retailers as they have had to face competition from two sides, one from large domestic firms and the other from foreign retailers (Joseph et al, 2008).At this point, the concept of One Person Company (OPC) recently introduced by the Indian Companies Act 2013, discussed as a possible step to corporatize small retailers by integrating them into the organized segment. Secondary sources of data, i.e. published reports, articles and survey results are analyzed in the paper. …
Innovative Application Development of Consumer Loyalty Management Schemes
In the current economic conditions, the utilization of present day techniques in innovation project management is a main thrust of development framework improvement. One of the key positions in the advancement extend administration is commercialization of innovative work comes about. The commercialization of innovative work results is unequivocally connected to the marketing of innovations. The primary part of creative promoting is client devotion keeping up. The point of the article is to consider and dissect the likelihood of use the techniques for client dedication administration to the region of inventive project administration, to consider and propose the product items that permits tackling the issue of overseeing consumer loyalty for imaginative projects utilizing the near investigation strategy and technique for expert assessment.
Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project
yet symbolic. At a time when European modernists integrated primitive art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas into their own oeuvre—viewing sculpture as the most primitive of art forms—critics quickly discerned an affinity between the formal qualities of Barela’s art and an evolving Western modernist aesthetic.29 FAP itself became imbued with this impulse through National Director Holger Cahill, who organized MoMA’s American Primitives (1930) and American Sources of Modern Art (1933) exhibitions, which connected U.S. art with preColumbian influences.30 Barela constituted a “link” to modernism rather than a modernist per se because his art was deemed primitive not simply in form but also in context. Although Hunter viewed santero art as a product of “exchange” between the “Christian and the pagan Indian,” with the passage of time, santos became distanced from “tradition,” and in turn, “primitive in feeling as well as in technique.” Moreover, when santos were “not made for religious purposes,” as in Barela’s case, “they became entirely primitive,” concluded Hunter.31 Divorced from academic training and ecclesiastical tradition (Barela rarely attended church), Barela became the timeless “primitive” whose lack of formal training encouraged the image of an artist moved by nature and intuition rather than by the modern trappings of status and materialism. Hunter’s own vision of his protégé as “child-like,” and in need of “guidance” and “protection” from tourists and “autograph seekers,” simply reinforced this image.32 As Hunter declared, “school means an unlimited observation of natural phenomena. . . . With the inherent adaptability of his realistic race, [Barela] takes things as they are with a fatalism not less than oriental, but he meets them with unconquerable idealism and fortitude. Knowing little of life’s tangible complications . . . he is free from our national passion for accumulating things. But of natural philosophy, of timeless wisdom, he knows more than most persons gain through formal degrees . . . faith is axiomatic and life has reason.”33 Barela’s work, being untrained, was considered a vital expression of spirituality. As Hunter repeatedly claimed, Barela was not like other santeros who were merely “copyists.”34 While Barela deployed a familiar religious iconography, his art bordered on ritual performance. Rooting Barela’s art so deeply within the world of Hispano religion simply affirmed the sense of the primitive for critics because the Anglo-American vision of Hispano Catholicism was already that of a faith lost in time, superstition, and the so-called archaic rites of confraternities such as the Order of 48 ✜ Journal of the Southwest the Penitent Brothers. Barela himself drew inspiration from the moradas (chapels) and death carts used by the Penitent Brothers in Holy Week processions. Although Anglo artists employed Hispano religious motifs in their own work, they invariably viewed this faith as “mystical, naïve, and primitive,” and as the very essence of Hispano life itself.35 Thus, for Barela too, art, faith, and creativity became manifestations of ritual. It did not matter that Barela was “not an orthodox Christian”: in the eyes of New Deal sponsors he remained “essentially religious.”36 Mestizaje, pan-americanism, and the universal In evaluating Barela’s art, critic Douglas Hale noted that “others have seen various cultural origins in Barela’s carvings: Moorish, Mayan, Aztec, Penitente, Navajo sand painting, Easter Island, early Christian.”37 Thus, despite the search for the authentic and the noted affinities between Barela and so-called “tribal art” from other parts of the world, Barela’s work was also distinctly hybrid: it was forged from a unique cultural synthesis over time, and as Wendell Anderson later observed, “out of the duality of Old and New World forms.”38 Most significantly, Barela’s synthesis was rooted firmly in the Americas. Contemporaries certainly viewed Barela’s work—and New Mexico itself—as lying at the intersection of the Americas. If Barela’s art was perceived as uniquely American in its everyday, popular appeal, it was also American by way of its cultural hybridity, which distanced it in time and space from European influences. Barela’s art became part of a cultural nationalism but also of a wider, hemispheric nationalism—panAmericanism. The connection between Latin American art, Native American art, and cultural diplomacy during the late 1930s and early 1940s has been acknowledged.39 But few scholars have explored the relationship between Hispano art and pan-Americanism. The call for hemispheric solidarity through artistic expression derived momentum at the regional level from the historical specificities of New Mexico’s ethnic and cultural landscapes. New Mexico lay at the center of a transnational relationship in reform and cultural policy during the 1920s and 1930s. As Suzanne Forrest notes, the Hispanic New Deal in New Mexico became entwined with the revival of Native American arts and with Mexico’s cultural revolution and sponsorship of the popular arts. In Mexico, Anglo patrons and Modernity and Mestizaje ✜ 49 reformers found a perfect model for the preservation of Hispano and Native American culture.40 These links become more apparent when we consider that there was not simply an overlap in ideology but in personnel too. New Deal Indian Policy under John Collier developed from existing links with New Mexico and patrons in Santa Fe. Collier also looked to Mexican folk art when creating the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Collier brought folk art specialist René d’Harnoncourt north from Mexico to work on the board after d’Harnoncourt organized several key exhibitions of Mexican art in the USA during 1930.41 And it was d’Harnoncourt’s exhibition of Mexican art that was deployed to improve intercultural relations in New Mexico. During 1931, d’Harnoncourt’s Mexican art exhibit traveled to Albuquerque and Santa Fe with the support of the Mexican consulate and with the aim of acknowledging the state’s Hispano population and stimulating the preservation of Hispano arts through community art centers and vocational education. Writing to d’Harnoncourt, New Mexico Governor Arthur Seligman promoted Santa Fe in particular as “the largest center of this character in the United States,” while the Albuquerque Morning Journal declared the city “the historic contact point between America and Mexico.”42 Nina Perea Collier, a FAP state official and daughter-in-law of John Collier, worked for the Indian Bureau and later for the Office for Inter-American Affairs. Perea Collier noted the obvious connections between Latin American and Hispano arts but conceded that more effort could have been made to integrate Hispano culture into the government’s pan-American initiative.43 Hunter and Cahill did however arrange for a traveling exhibition of Mexican children’s artwork to be sent to New Mexico’s Hispano community art centers, and in return, sent the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design for display across Latin America.44 New Mexico remained an important testing ground for intercultural relations into the 1940s. For Mexican American scholar J. Manuel Espinosa, the state’s “harmonious combination” of indigenous, Spanish, and Anglo peoples made New Mexico “a significant laboratory of the Good Neighbor Policy.”45 Although there are few direct references to Barela in terms of cultural diplomacy, Barela’s art represented Espinosa’s “true synthesis of the Americas.” This perhaps explains Barela’s position as one of the few sculptors to exhibit at the New York’s World’s Fair American Art Today show (1939). Barela’s hybrid art forms complemented the intercultural emphasis of the fair perfectly. Designed to 50 ✜ Journal of the Southwest establish connections between old and contemporary cultural expression in much the same way that critics perceived affinities between primitive and modern art, the fair planned as one of its key themes and expositions the “cultural evolution and development of man in the three Americas” with the aim of “bringing the peoples of the Three Americas into a relationship of closer understanding.”46 Indeed, conceived within this transnational perspective, the link between mestizaje and modernism becomes much more than incidental. As Tace Hedrick demonstrates, in Latin America a specific form of mestizo modernism was formulated between 1900 and 1940, a modernism that considered “how to fuse, or hybridize, modernity and indigenous tradition” and how to blend regionalism, locality, and the vernacular with “a continental sense of ‘Americanism.’” Mirroring the interest shown in Barela’s art, Latin America’s mestizo modernism derived inspiration from rural, folk, and indigenous traditions: in this way, the “un-modern” would soothe the contradictions of modernity while being inserted into a forwardand future-thinking nation. According to Hedrick, Diego Rivera’s pan-American hybrid aesthetic typified mestizo modernism in its bid to transcend the “seeming antinomies of modern life: the North and the South, the mechanical with the organic, the agrarian with the modern, and of course, the Indian with the Hispanic.”47 If this modernism involved biological and cultural mestizaje, it also reflected the assumption of MoMA’s American Sources and American Primitives exhibitions: that the modern and the un-modern could coexist in one hemispheric space across time (albeit on an unequal footing). Barela must be understood within this framework of mestizo modernism, because it too impacted the United States as a distinctive form of modernism, one intimately tied to and resistant of the hegemonic forces of U.S. and European modernism. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, Rivera’s mestizo modernism filtered northwards through the “Mexican art invasion,” described by Helen Delpar, to coincide with the U.S. desire for art that was both “untainted by academic [and European] modernism and