Om Prakash Dabas, a farmer from Haryana’s Jainpur Sadan village, is picking out dals; his son is mulling over buying a three-in-one pack of Kurkure. Another farmer, Amar Singh, is checking out a pair of trousers.

The three are in a brightly-lit, airy hall, near Ladhwa, a small town 20 km from Kurukshetra. Within the 6,000 square feet space are rows and rows of racks bursting with groceries, snacks, crockery, electronic goods and much more.

The farmers then push their trolleys to the computerised checkout counter where a young man, in a green and yellow monogrammed T-shirt, holds a barcode reading device. Dabas loads the stuff on to his tractor and hits the highway back to his village, 7 km away.

Were the farmers at Subhiksha? Big Bazaar? The bill gives some clues. The items listed include dals, soaps — and fertilisers and cattle feed. Dabas has just left a Hariyali Kisan Bazaar (HKB), one of 101 outlets of the Delhi-based DCM Shriram Consolidated Ltd (DSCL).

Giving DSCL company are ITC, with 24 Choupal Saagar stores in three states, Triveni Engineering, with 44 Triveni Khushali Bazaars (TKB) in four states, Godrej Agrovet, with 48 Godrej Aadhar stores in eight states, Tata Chemicals with 800 Tata Kisan Sansar franchisees and the state-owned Indian Oil with 1,400 Kisan Seva Kendras in five states.

Small vegetable vendors and others have launched a fierce agitation against retail chains in urban India. But big business is quietly introducing a retail revolution in rural and semi-urban India. These trendy stores in — or just outside — mofussil towns sell everything from seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and cattle feed to household goods. Each store serves anywhere from 40 to over 200 villages. Special discounts are on offer, as are tie-ups with banks and insurance companies and hospitals. ITC’s Choupal Saagars have partnerships with the Apollo group in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh and the Care Foundation in Maharashtra. As a result, it has a doctor, pathology lab and pharmacy on the premises.

The Choupal Saagars even have a food court which serve tea and bread, as well as thalis, pizzas and burgers, a boon for farmers who spend the whole day waiting for ITC to grade and buy their produce, explains S. Sivakumar, chief executive of ITC’s agri businesses.

Most of these stores didn’t start out as full-fledged retail outlets. When DSCL started the first Hariyali Kisan Bazaar in 2002, it only intended to sell agricultural products to farmers, bundling these with advice from trained agronomists. The idea, notes Kalyan Chakravarthy, country head of the food and agribusiness strategic advisory and research wing of Yes Bank, was to win customers for the agri-businesses.

It worked, says Rajesh Gupta, business head of Hariyali Kisan Bazaar. The store was not pushing any one brand of inputs — it was offering advice free of cost and allowing defective supplies to be returned. For farmers, used to unscrupulous local shopkeepers, this was a godsend. Soon, they began asking HKB to stock common grocery products too.

A year after its launch in 2005, Triveni Khushali Bazaar's logo has changed from a shaft of wheat to a figure of a consumer with a shopping bag. “By focusing only on agricultural goods we were addressing only the farmer,” says Tarun Sawhney, corporate vice-president at Triveni Engineering. “We also wanted to reach out to women and children .”

The non-agricultural products in the stores help hold on to customers by saving them a trip to the main town. Besides, at both the Choupal Saagars and HKBs, there is ample space to park and manoeuvre tractor-trolleys, plus assurance about the price, quality and range of products.

The stores have introduced new brands and showcased unknown ones. At Triveni Khushali Bazaar’s Kashipur outlet in Uttarakhand, Eve-N lipsticks sit next to Color Bar and Jolen while at Hariyali Kisan Bazaar’s Ladhwa store, Blue Heaven foundation sticks and Bunty, Babli and Cobra spray perfumes nestle alongside Lakmé cosmetics.

All this draws customers from small towns as well. “We don’t have anything similar here,” says Kashipur resident Poonam Chaudhury, a regular at the air-conditioned Triveni Khushali Bazaar, where salesgirls wearing long black skirts and white shirts help women buy handbags, costume jewellery and clothes. All Triveni Khushali Bazaars offer a 3 per cent discount to employees of large factories in their vicinity. The food courts at the Choupal Saagars are a boon for small towners who want an evening out. As a result, all these stores have customers coming in through the year, not just during the agricultural seasons.

These stores haven’t faced the wrath of the anti-retail lobby yet. They won’t, says Chakravarty. The bulk of their business still comes from agricultural inputs and farmers are fiercely loyal as customers. Besides, points out R.K. Goel, business head of Triveni Retail Ventures, the stores haven’t really affected the local grocery stores.

Doing business isn’t easy, though, with infrastructure and customers proving to be difficult. Long power breakdowns are common, forcing companies to spend on generators. And at one Godrej Aadhar outlet in Punjab, a former employee recalls, a farmer once slapped a salesman because he wouldn’t take back a transistor that the farmer wanted to exchange for a two-in-one.

Nevertheless, the companies are gung-ho about these stores. That’s natural, says Chakravarthy. The number of middle income (annual income of Rs 45,000 to Rs 2.15 lakh) households in rural India is the same as in cities. With the increased focus on rural infrastructure and agriculture, disposable incomes will only increase. “There’s a huge opportunity out there waiting to be tapped.”

Dabas on his tractor would agree.