Bharti Enterprises, one of India's two biggest telecom operators, said on Tuesday that it was in the final stages of choosing a retail partner for its farm unit, FieldFresh Foods. America's Wal-Mart and France's Carrefour have been in talks with the company, but Bharti chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal revealed at a London trade conference on Tuesday that Britain's Tesco was on the short list.

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To date the Indian government has only allowed single-brand retailers like Britain's Marks & Spencer to enter its market. Until the barriers for foreign retailers are relaxed, overseas merchants are reduced to busying themselves in India's wholesale sector, as does Germany's Metro or forming joint ventures with the likes of FieldFresh.

FieldFresh, which uses the tagline, "Linking Indian fields to the world," is itself a fifty-fifty partnership between Bharti Enterprises and ELRo Holdings India, an investment company founded and owned by Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, of the Rothschild banking dynasty.

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Considering FieldFresh's ostensibly British connections, or the fact that it reportedly already supplies some food to Tesco, it already looks likely that Bharti will choose the UK candidate over Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour. Shore Capital analyst Clive Black believes Tesco has an extra edge over those rivals because it has a major administrative office in Bangalore, giving it access to middle class consumers through its own employees. "Tesco is very experienced now in trading in very diverse markets, from Ireland to Korea, to the Czech Republic," Black said.

However, research conducted by IGD, a not-for-profit food-industry research organization, earlier this year suggested that Wal-Mart in fact be the first to enter the Indian food and grocery retail market, either with its hypermarket format, or at least with cash and carry operations in the unrestricted wholesale sector.

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"Tesco is unlikely to enter India in the short term, while it concentrates on other key markets like the US and China, and Carrefour is currently focused on optimizing the performance of its existing portfolio," IGD said in a press release.

But Shore's Black believes Tesco will still manage. "I think Tesco is over the period of greatest risk. It can keep all its plates spinning, and certainly has done so up until now."