MUMBAI, India — Wal-Mart Stores gave up on India’s huge market on Wednesday, announcing that it had indefinitely delayed its once-ambitious plans to open hundreds of superstores across the country.

The announcement adds to the gloom enrobing the Indian economy. Growth has slowed sharply and the value of the rupee has fallen starkly in recent months. It also suggests that the government’s efforts to lure more foreign investment are failing, but the governing United Progressive Alliance’s plan has never been popular with India’s politically vocal retailers.

Wal-Mart, the Bentonville, Ark., company that is the world’s largest retailer, also announced that it was ending its joint effort with Bharti Enterprises of India to operate 20 wholesale “cash and carry” stores that sell to other businesses like retailers, hotels and restaurants. Wal-Mart plans to buy Bharti’s 50 percent stake in the venture, and the two companies will operate independent businesses in India. That Wal-Mart kept the wholesale business, long seen as a way to learn about India’s fragmented retailing sector, suggests it has not entirely ended its hopes of eventually selling at a retail level.

In 2007, Wal-Mart announced with great fanfare that along with Bharti, it planned to open “hundreds” of stores, the kind of ambitious proposition that many international companies hatched early in the century as hopes blossomed that India would soon join China as an emerging economic colossus. But many of those same companies have quietly shelved their expansion plans after complex market conditions — spotty electricity, poor roads and government ineptitude — frustrated hopes of rapid profits.