May 2025

What is our vision for India? This was one of the questions thrown at us in one of our strategy building exercises. We see a big queue outside the USA Embassy here in India and I wish to envision a day when there will be a big queue outside the Indian Embassy in the USA. This reply came from the Founder Trustee. This idea stays at the heart of CCS vision for India, a prosperous country. Achieving this vision requires every Indian to have agency to be able to flourish. The country has done quite well on the economic front post economic liberalisation of 1991. However, there is one question that has constantly haunted the Indian economic model and that is the ’rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer’. We find that the formal sector is able to reap the benefits of the reforms, so are the people working in the sector. However, there is a significant population that makes livelihoods from the informal sector which is untouched by the reforms. Can the informal sector transition to the formal sector to be able to participate and grow? To develop a deeper understanding of the informal sector, we conducted a study titled Law, Liberty and Livelihoods. To build awareness on the nature and challenges of the informal sector, we started Jeevika: Documentary Festival. To test this idea of the possibility of formalising the informal sector, we picked one of the occupations ‘street vending’ and started advocating for a policy to recognise street vending as a legitimate means of making a livelihood. 

In the year 2014, The Government of India passed the ‘Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act’ which brings legitimacy to the occupation. While this is a legislation passed by the Union Government, the implementation is to be done by the States and Urban Local Bodies. In the subsequent years, we came up with studies to track compliance and implementation of the law. In the year 2021, we conducted a study to assess the state of harassment of street vendors, and found that approx 91% of street vendors didn’t know of the existence of the law made to protect them. This is when we started thinking of a bottom up scalable solution and this is how Jeevika Mobile Application came into existence. The idea was to use technology to develop a minimum viable product that works to:

1. Empower with information: Easy to consume audio, visual content on the key provisions of the law
2. Empower the community to be a part of the solution: Street vendors to be able to connect with other street vendors in the market to evolve solutions
3. Empower with legal aid: Access legal aid in case of eviction, confiscation or penalty.

We pilot tested the Application in Delhi and Jaipur with approx. 7,000 street vendors and have started seeing the benefits. Using the Jeevika mobile application, street vendors have been able to contest eviction and reduce the amount of penalty. We are going to build on the success of the pilot to add more features and scale it up to hundreds of thousands in the next 2 years. The success of our intervention will not only help street vendors to benefit but will also open up the possibilities to unlock the potential of the entire informal economy enabling poor nano-entrepreneurs to climb on the economic ladder.