Working Life of Street Vendors in Mumbai

Street vending accounts for a significant share of Mumbai's self-employed workers. According to the Government of India's National Policy on Urban Street Vendors (2006), there are approximately 10 million street vendors across India, of whom around 250,000 are in Mumbai. This means that 12.5 per cent of Mumbai's total self-employed population — estimated at two million — depends on street vending for their livelihood.

Street vending in Mumbai serves a large portion of the city's population. Around 30 per cent of the Mumbai workforce buys at least one meal a day from street vendors, the study notes citing the 2009 Mumbai Human Development Report.

Over half of Mumbai's surveyed street vendors lived in extreme poverty. The study found that 53 per cent of the 400 vendors surveyed had a per capita household income of less than Rs. 20 per day (less than half a US dollar in 2011). The World Bank's poverty line for developing countries in 2011 was one US dollar per day per person.

The study found that vendors borrow mainly for social security, not business. Of the 236 vendors who reported borrowing money, around 54 per cent borrowed for social security purposes — including healthcare, medication, maternity expenses, children's education, and daughters' marriages. Only about 34 per cent borrowed for their economic activities, and around 11 per cent borrowed to pay housing deposits.

Moneylenders were noted to be the primary source of credit for vendors, and they charged extremely high interest rates. About 57 per cent of the 236 vendors who borrowed depended on moneylenders, and 26 per cent on wholesalers. The interest rate on short-term loans from moneylenders ranged from 5 to 10 per cent per month. Vendors who borrowed from wholesalers, though not charged a regular interest rate, unknowingly paid 25 to 35 per cent more than the cost price of their goods. The study found that women vendors depended on moneylenders more than men — there were 64 per cent of women borrowers versus 53 per cent of men borrowers.

Many vendors surveyed had repaid several times the original amount they borrowed. Around 54 per cent of the 236 vendors who borrowed had already paid interest equal to the principal amount they had borrowed, while others had paid two, three, or even more times the original sum.

The study notes that bribes to the police and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) regularly eat into vendors' daily earnings. It states that vendors paid monthly bribes of Rs. 100-300 to the police and Rs. 300-500 to the BMC. Nearly 41 per cent of vendors paid between Rs. 20 and Rs. 50 in total daily bribes (to both the police and BMC combined).

Women vendors face sharper deprivation than men. Around 41 per cent of the surveyed vendors were women, and 31 per cent of them were widows. Women vendors were also generally older, less educated, and earned less than their male counterparts — no woman vendor in the survey fell in the highest income category (Rs. 1,000-1,600 per day).

Women primarily sold vegetables, fruits, and cooked food — items that require low capital investment but involve the longest and most demanding working hours, sometimes starting as early as 4 a.m. They also carried out unpaid domestic work and frequently brought their children to the vending site, which affected both their attention and their sales.

The study found collective organising among Mumbai's street vendors to be extremely limited. Only around 2,500 of Mumbai's estimated 2,50,000 street vendors were members of any union, cooperative, or social security scheme. Most vendors avoided paying even nominal membership fees and preferred to borrow from private moneylenders rather than engage with formal organisations.

Vendors' incomes had not improved over the decade between 2001 and 2010, the paper notes. A comparable study from 2001 found that the daily income of male vendors was Rs. 70 and of women vendors was Rs. 40. The present study found that over 62 per cent of the vendor population has a per capita income of only Rs. 20 to Rs. 35 per day, indicating that real incomes have not improved – and may have worsened – over ten years. One key factor behind this stagnation was the compulsion to pay regular bribes, which had been increasing in the years prior to the study's completion.

Focus and Factoids by Prabhjot Grewal.