Street Vendor Economics Field Study

Estimates put the number of street vendors in India somewhere between 40 lakh and one crore people, and almost every Indian city quietly runs on them: the fruit thela outside the metro gate, the chaat cart at the college crossing, the chai stall that opens at six for auto drivers. The Street Vendors Act of 2014 promised each of them a survey, a certificate of vending, a marked vending zone and a seat on a Town Vending Committee. A decade later most vendors have never seen a survey form, borrow their working capital at daily rates that would alarm any banker, and cannot state their own profit margin because nobody has ever written it down for them.

The intern writes it down. Over four weeks you interview 15 to 20 vendors in one market cluster using a structured question set carried on a phone in google-forms, reconstruct each vendor's daily profit and loss statement rupee by rupee in excel, convert informal borrowing terms into an annualised cost of capital, and compare average net daily earnings with the state minimum wage for unskilled work. The output is a dossier of anonymised one-page vendor profiles, a unit economics workbook, a 12-16 page field report and a 10-12 slide briefing deck built in powerpoint for a Town Vending Committee audience.

Completing the project takes the intern through the full arc of informal sector fieldwork: ethical consent, structured interviewing, cost reconstruction from memory-based recall, annualising daily interest, benchmarking against a statutory wage floor, and turning messy human answers into defensible numbers. Development organisations, microfinance lenders, CSR teams and research institutes hire precisely for this ability to produce credible primary evidence about people the formal data misses, and the public repository gives the intern original field research to point recruiters at.