Super Bazar: A landmark cries for attention

One day in 1970, Chetan Sharma, a Delhi University student at the time, and his friends took a fatfatiya (back then, public transport vehicles that could carry six to eight people built around the body of old Harley Davidson motorbikes) for eight anna from Gurdwara Sisganj Sahib in Chandni Chowk to Connaught Place (CP).

- Paras Singh

The young men were bursting with excitement as they raced towards the bustling Super Bazar, India's first superstore, located near Shankar Market in CP. It was time to spend the 270 they had pooled in to buy the coveted, compact transistor, whose handle did the work of an antenna.

"But we knew it would take us hours to hold that transistor in our hands. The queue outside Super Bazar reached the fire station in Connaught Place's outer circle. It's like how people queue up now to buy the latest iPhone.

Super Bazar was the place to visit at the time," recalled Sharma (70), a retired businessman.

Super Bazar, a six-storey superstore Delhi and India's first which served as a city landmark for decades, now stands lost to time and neglect. It was launched in 1966, months after the 1965 India-Pakistan war, by the Congress-led central government as a measure to keep price rise in check. The supermarket, which was developed by the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), sold everything from subsidised sugar to palm oil, vegetables to HMT watches, stationery to construction material, even transistors, and, when they eventually became available, computers.

Its glory days were long behind it when it shut in 2002, weighed down by huge losses it incurred since the mid-'90s. As per an April 2018 report by the ministry of consumer affairs, Super Bazar began incurring losses in 1996, due to "overstaffing, failure of management, inadequacy of working capital, and a lack of competitive approach on part of the management." For the last two decades, Super Bazar has been locked in a long, messy arbitration with employee unions over the closure and payment of their dues.