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New Delhi: After decades of consumer deprivation - when shops had nothing much worth buying - the new India of gleaming chrome-and-steel malls, bursting with objects of desire, has given rise to a shoplifting epidemic.
Figures just released by the Centre for Retail Research in Nottingham, the UK, show that India has the greatest number of shoplifters in a survey of 36 countries.
Theft (by customers and staff) in India in 2008 was $2.543 billion (Dh9.34 billion), an increase of 6.9 per cent as compared to last year's figure. India has beaten Britain, the shoplifting champion in Europe, where about £1.5 billion (Dh8.45 billion) worth of products were stolen in 2007.
The Centre's report says that 23 million Indians steal every year with alcohol and women's clothes topping the list of preferred items.
After India, the next in the ranking was Mexico, Thailand, South Africa and Malaysia. The lowest rates of theft were found in Japan, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark.
Customers accounted for almost 50 per cent of the theft, with shop employees responsible for 27 per cent and the rest arising from administrative errors.
"Just seven or eight years ago, there were hardly any big stores in Delhi, just tiny dusty, shabby shops where there was nothing you'd want to buy. Shoplifting was unheard of. It's a totally new phenomenon," said Akash Sohal, a women's lingerie shopkeeper in Lajpat Nagar.
The scale of theft is partly due to retailers being slow on the uptake and not installing electronic anti-theft devices such as tagging and closed-circuit cameras, which are routine in other parts of the world.
"In India, most retailers do not consider theft a major concern and don't invest in security systems. They do not realise that it is killing their bottom-line directly," said Dharmesh Lamba, country manager of Checkpoint Systems India Private Limited.
Casual arrangement
Only recently have some shopkeepers in Khan Market, a popular market in Delhi, started asking shoppers to leave their bags by the door before entering. But the whole arrangement is still fairly casual and ad hoc.
India has witnessed a retail revolution in recent years with hundreds of shopping malls mushrooming all over the country, changing the landscape and habits.
A new consumerism has arrived. Indians want their lifestyles to match those of others in their social milieu and a new culture of 'instant gratification', utterly at variance with the culture of abstinence that was the norm for decades after independence, has taken root.
"Everyone wants the latest mobile phone, the latest clothes and accessories. Even children badger their parents for computer games and gadgets. That old custom of saving and waiting till you had the money to buy something has vanished," said Divendra Bhansal, a retired school teacher.
More than the poor, it appears to be the urban middle class that has nimble fingers. The poor, in any case, are too intimidated to walk into a shopping mall.
Police in Mumbai last month arrested four women from well-to-do families who used to go shoplifting wearing sequinned burqas lined with secret pockets.
Children for cover
The women always took along their children so that they could create a diversion, allowing the women to slip their booty, usually jewellery, into their bags or pockets and slip away.
"I am not at all surprised at the latest figures. Otherwise, law-abiding customers take great pleasure in robbing stores. They don't consider it to be 'true' theft," said Atul Gupta, operations manager at Wave shopping mall in Noida, just outside the capital.
But Lamba believes that the latest report will make retailers wake up. "They've been shocked at the figures. They will probably start taking theft seriously now," he said.
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