Survival of small traders

Succession, the mammoth-sized computers, requiring space in large rooms, shrank to first pocket-size and then to hand-held calculators. It didn’t long for the desk top computers to be used in storage of data (both figures and words), sending mails to any destination across the world in a matter of seconds, virtually reaching the target recipients instantly. Engineers took to computers in designing their complex machines with consummate ease. To make a long story short, digitisation of all written as well as spoken matter conquered the entire globe, India too taking top spot, a fact that doesn’t need to be elaborated. Digital technology’s products are now in the hands of millions causing electronics-derived-devices flooding across the world.

We are at present placed comfortably in the world of trade and commerce, totally dominated by electronics, to the extent that if anyone doesn’t understand e-commerce, e-banking, e-this, e-that, that person is dubbed as e-illiterate, to one’s own misery. The scenario of ‘e’ doesn’t end with possessing the ubiquitous smart phone, one has to be conversant with the newly emerging digital literacy.

The era of conveying information by recording on paper, called nowadays as hard copy, seems to have moved to the pages of history. People at both ends of sending and receiving particulars about themselves have no choice other than e-mailing, SMS messages and WhatsApp, called soft copy. Sadly, photographic companies which held sway for more than hundred years had to close their shop once for all rendering photography independent of film for printing images. The latest to happen in the world of digital technology is even toddlers flaunting electronic devices lost in playing video games. In their august company are the urban youth, sporting both jazzy and scanty attires ordering a wide range of consumer goods online. That is the face of e-commerce.

The newfangled online buying things impulsively is taking away the livelihood of traditional small-time trading fraternity. The e-commerce giants are pricing conventional traders (familiar to old-timers of Mysuru) out of the market even as the civil society is patronising e-commerce players unwittingly. Survival of small traders is a big question.