Small is bountiful

In her new book Lilliput Land, Rama Bijapurkar highlights India’s micro-consumer miracle.

Small towns and rural areas rely heavily on kirana stores for their retail needs. | Photo Credit: RUPAK DE CHOWDHURI/REUTERS

The Faberge egg, the curate egg, the khichdi, the elephant, and the blind men of Indostan, the glass half empty, and the glass half full—what do these metaphors all have in common? India. In her new book, Lilliput Land: How Small is Driving India’s Mega Consumption Story, management thinker Rama Bijapurkar strongly stresses India’s diversity as she navigates the complexities and opportunities of the Indian consumer market.

Lilliput Land: How Small is Driving India’s Mega Consumption Story

By Rama Bijapurkar

Penguin Business

Pages: 304

Price: Rs.699

Bijapurkar borrows the straightforward interpretation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to establish India’s position in the global market as “a land of small-sized people together overpower the giant”. She champions India’s consumer market as the “story of lots and lots of small consumers earning and spending just a little bit individually that adds up to an enormous amount” who are served by millions of small suppliers in return.

Lilliput Land is divided into three broad sections—Consumer India Structure Story, Consumer Behaviour Story, and Supply Side Story. The demarcation of sections is easiest to make out by the way Bijapurkar’s writing style changes. The first section cuts to the chase, dealing exclusively with numbers and graphs. In a bold move, Bijapurkar breaks down the country’s consumer demographic by using income instead of the usual expenditure. Since income is connected to a country’s GDP, especially for India whose image is based on its high GDP rank, it becomes harder to face reality when the real numbers are much lower than what economists would like.

India’s ‘middle class’

Alternatively, she reconciles the micro of household income levels with the macro of GDP using personal disposable income (PDI). Once this idea has been sufficiently introduced, Bijapurkar marches on with full steam, flinging in percentages and quintiles, data showcasing PDI, net national income (NNI), and GDP, as well as data from the World Bank, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), and People Research on India’s Consumer Economy (PRICE).

In Lilliput Land, Rama Bijapurkar strongly stresses India’s diversity as she navigates the complexities and opportunities of the Indian consumer market.

She formats some of it in bullet points to provide a breather from page-long paragraphs. While the data strengthens her arguments, especially as she traces India’s post-COVID recovery and delves into the label of India’s “middle class”, the information is too densely packed without any accompanying interpretation. That is to say, this book is not for beginners who wish to learn about the Indian consumer market or even those who are interested in understanding it. Without any prior knowledge of economics or the basics of the consumer market, the reader will not be able to make it through even one-quarter of the book.

Although an information overload, the first half of the book shows Bijapurkar’s expertise in understanding the consumers of India as she deftly connects occupation with education, income, and consequently the class hierarchy and its movement in India, while also performing in-depth analyses of consumers based on geography—rural, urban, and peri-urban. One of the key reasons why small suppliers have done so well in the Indian market is that large companies often tend to target the richest 20 per cent without understanding how the income structure of households affects a consumer’s lifestyle and thus their consumption basket.

This is illustrated with various examples and underscores the rise of the D2C model (Direct-to-consumer) because of digital marketing and e-retailing. These are what Bijapurkar calls “Lilliput Brands” and what she explains has brought real change into the Indian market.

The second half of the book has a completely different pacing than its data-driven counterpart. In the second section, as Bijapurkar explores consumer behaviour, she plasters too many anecdotes with numbers far and few in between. Though hinted at multiple times, it is never forthrightly addressed in the book that a large part of consumer behaviour is due in part to the capitalistic society the world runs on.

Generalising the North-South divide

Bijapurkar brings up an interesting point when she mentions the North-South divide in India and how that affects consumption choices. However, instead of connecting their different lifestyles to their economic choices, Bijapurkar takes the time to make generalisations about South India and goes on to describe her own multi-cultural identity as an Indian. In the end, she does, however, make a case for the heterogeneity of the Indian market that goes hand-in-hand with consumer diversity. She says, “In India, adaptability is considered a far bigger virtue than uniformity”.

This is very true for the Indian consumer market and a reason that can be attributed to Walmart’s failure as a supplier in India as well. Walmart, an American multinational retail corporation (MNC), had initially thrived by setting up in small towns with a population below 10,000. However, in the Indian market, such volumes are too small to sustain the profitability of large-scale stores in those localities. Therefore, small towns and rural areas rely heavily on kirana stores for their retail needs. As Bijapurkar draws out different stereotypical players in the Indian market from the “IIT/IIM culture class” to the “Start-up community”, her concise writing begins to meander, a tonal shift in the book from consumer market exploration to almost guidebook-like.

In arriving at the final section of the book, the reader becomes far too familiar with Bijapurkar’s writing and she too in an attempt to wrap it up begins to repeat her examples and numbers. But it is also in this part that one can truly understand the target audience of the book. Although the book is a bonanza of knowledge, it ultimately sells the ways of the Indian consumer market to MNCs who wish to set up in India and to those who are already in the market and want to capture the interest of Indians further. In celebrating India’s consumers and suppliers as Lilliputians, Lilliput Land issues an invite to Gullivers to try and challenge them.

Mridula Vijayarangakumar interned with Frontline between January and April 2024.