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Changing demographics, higher disposable income and improved agri-produce realisation have made smaller cities and rural areas the future hotbeds of growth. And Indian retailers are in no mood to miss out on this big, untapped growth opportunity.
India may decide in two to three months whether to allow companies including Wal-mart Stores Inc and Carrefour to open retail stores in Asia's third-largest economy, an official said
"We'd expect many of the retailers to be in the region of 25% growth," Kumar Rajagopalan, chief executive officerof the Retailers Association of India, told Bloomberg. "The biggest segment of growth is the middle class."
After over a decade of India reporting wholesale inflation on the basis of a basket of 435 commodities, the new WPI series will come into effect from September 14. The new series increases the items under coverage by nearly 50% and promises to provide a more accurate index for calculating the inflation rate
Says Google India Managing Director Shailesh Rao: “From being an object of curiosity and experimentation, Google has now become a mission-critical part of businesses. The language today is no longer about clicks and impressions; it is about scaling and growing the business, acquiring customers, and up-selling new products and services.
According to Gartner, Symbian will hold a 40.1 percent OS market share at the end of 2010 followed by Android with 17.7 percent, Research in Motion's BlackBerry with 17.5 percent, Apple with 15.4 percent for the iOS used by the iPhone and Windows Mobile from Microsoft with 4.7 percent.
Not only is the plastic money in circulation in India falling, it is also underutilized. On an average, the annual number of transactions per credit cards stands at 11; it is only one in case of debit cards.
Japan's Consumer Confidence Survey index slumped to 42.4 in August from 43.3 in July, posting the second consecutive month-on-month drop, as fewer people were certain about their overall economic well-being and job security for the coming months.
This is the sixth consecutive month that the figures have gone down showing that the US consumer is still apprehensive when it comes to spending.
FONT-FAMILY:'Verdana',;mso-bidi-font-family:Helvetica"> The heterogeneity that characterizes the modern Indian consumer has created a maze that marketeers would like to unravel in order to target their products and services precisely. In this fortnightly series, Indicus Analytics presents the various facets of urban consumers, across geographies and socio-economic groups. Despite visible growth in rural markets, it is in the teeming urban centres that most of the action takes place. Indian cities vary not only in size but also in terms of economic activity. There are the bustling metropolises, towns dominated by manufacturing (Coimbatore-Tiruppur), large agrimarket towns (Guntur), towns that are basically transport hubs (Itarsi) and mining towns (Dhanbad). And then there are numerous small towns, most of which have no special characteristic—overgrown villages whose markets attract people from the countryside now. 
There are so many facets of the Indian consumer market that it can be sliced and diced in a variety of ways, with each categorization bringing out strikingly distinct features that can make a difference in the way we see the Indian consumer.
To begin with, there is the classic Bharat and India divide of rural markets and urban markets. Of course, there is the big problem of heterogeneity within these two large groups; one could look at variations by region, for instance.
But leaving that issue aside for now, there are at least 600,000 villages and close to 5,000 cities. Do all these really fall into two neat categories—rural and urban? Rural India is much more than the traditional image of small and scattered villages cut off from urban life. In fact, there are 15,000 villages with population in the range of 5,000-10,000, same as 1,000 towns.
Again, this classification of what makes up an urban area comes from the Census done a decade ago, and the character of these villages and towns has changed dramatically since then. Even if we look at the smaller villages, better connectivity, through the road and telecom networks have integrated many of these within the influence of urban markets. 
The government appears to be going all out with plans to address the shortage of qualified health personnel in India
India needs to focus on the rural-urban gap in bank penetration to achieve financial inclusion
The country has made progress in reducing infant mortality but it is still some distance from its 2015 target
As we expected, the growth numbers for the first quarter of 2010-11 came in high at 8.8%, the highest in more than two years. But this will also be the highest growth we see this year.
Continued Tightening of Interest Rates may keep Economic Expansion below 8.5%
India Health Report 2010 - Indicus Analytics and Business Standard publication
The Indian consumer market has two features that make it attractive and at the same time challenging for marketeers—it is large and it is complex
A4 is a small segment with large families, households whose chief wage earners are graduates or postgraduates working as professionals, managers or businessmen. | 
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