Prabhat Patnaik: Walmart Deal Would be a Colonial Style Deindustrialisation of the Economy

Challenging the assertion that consumers in India will gain with the availability of cheap imported goods through Walmart's takeover of Flipkart, Prof Prabhat Patnaik, argued that ‘consumers are not a distinct identity from local producers who will be displaced by cheaper imports. With the control of the Indian market by two multinational retail giants, we will see two distinct processes of deindustrialisation; one of local traders and the other of local producers’.