India has about 13 million kirana stores, small neighborhood shops. As delivery apps spread, many kiranas are trying to keep their regular customers by offering home delivery. “We can’t go fully online so we have started taking orders on WhatsApp Business,” one shopkeeper told Outlook Business. They also keep the khata, the credit account for regular customers, which the apps cannot match.
Not every store survives. A distributors’ federation reported that 200,000 kirana stores closed in a single year.