The Great Indian Ripoff

In the bazaars feeding a billion people and selling anything under the sun, it’s hard to tell the real from the impostor. Choose carefully.

- Jeevan Prakash Sharma

Up a narrow street in one of the shanty colonies in East Delhi, we are on the top floor of an unassuming, three-storey building. It’s a decent-sized hall, about 700 sq feet, the size of a compact 2BHK. Two people, both in their 30s, are stacking empty packets in neat piles on a large table. Nescafe 500 gm, one of the top coffee buys in the world. You still can’t smell the coffee…it’s empty, remember?

Well, figuratively speaking, you can. It’s a stiff concoction. Before Nescafe, they’d just finished stacking empty 200 gm packets of Tata Tea, India’s top tea brand. Besides, one can see bundles of several other big brands strewn around the hall: things you wash with (Surf Excel, Tide); things you put in your food (Maggie Masala, Tata Salt); things you put on your body (Sunsilk, Dove, Pantene). All empty…. The maal is elsewhere.

So what exactly is happening here? Well, this is a super bazaar of another kind, and we’re at a point high up on its invisible production chain. With a 10-color rotogravure printing machine, these men are printing the packaging materials of over 100 top brands: processed food, dairy products, auto spare parts, what have you. It’s off the radar and totally illegal, of course. But you don’t even realize it when these labels quietly come out of the dark and join the well-lit racks of the real superbazaar.