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This chapter discusses The Context of Street Vendors in India: A Tale of Invisible Visibility in August during the Executive Committee Meeting of National Alliance of Street Vendors of India (NASVI). During the Mumbai workshop, a vendor talked about the idea of a Natural Market, as a place where buyers naturally congregated, such as at a temple or a hospital, as opposed to places where municipal authorities attempted to rehabilitate evicted vendors where buyers did not come automatically. The Street Vending Act states that no existing street vendor can be displaced until the local authorities conduct a census of street vendors in the concerned urban centre and prepare a City Vending Plan. Representatives of street vendors will constitute 40 per cent of its membership and women will comprise at least 33 per cent of the street vendors’ representatives. Another factor which brought vendors closer to NASVI is its holistic understanding of vendors’ needs.

Indian economy is based on the unorganised sector. The mayhem created to the daily earner on the streets of Delhi. Once it was considered that the street vending was one of the easiest occupations for the survival of the people living in the lowest ladder in the economy. Anyone who does not have any means of earning can espouse vending as profession as it has societal sanction and acceptability in terms of diversity and universalistic point of view. In search of better livelihood, people used to migrate from rural India to urban metros like Delhi. The analysis of the pre-conditions of the street vendors will help us to have a glimpse of prior COVID-19 situation in the region. Now, this chapter tries to debate on the kind of adaptability that street vendors needed post COVID-19 era. An informal interview conducted with the street vendors help us to comprehend their preparedness for their adaptability to survive. This chapter also tries to discuss some of the programmes and policies that can be a lifeline for the street vendors during the post COVID-19 era.

Street workers, including street vendors, buskers, and waste pickers, constitute around 10–20% of the total working population of the world. Yet they are often denied their right to organise, they cannot exercise their right to be represented in decisions that directly affect their lives and futures. The entries in this chapter gathered from the leaders of street vendors associations and media representatives throughout the world, reflect their struggles to organise, to maintain a livelihood and to survive in pandemic conditions. Arbind Singh and César García Arnal give a profile of the street vendors in India and Spain respectively and explore how social and solidarity economy, a concept that, however, is still not clear to some experts in the field offers a solution to the problems rising after Corona pandemic. Evren Laçin tells the story of the foundation of the Street Vendors Association of İzmir and explains how it provides a great example to other municipalities across Turkey by bringing the ‘street economy’ model to our city and making life a part of the street. Dinçer Mendillioğlu, on the other hand, bring out the story of the Association of Recycling Workers, which is the first of its kind and which is established by the recycling workers or waste pickers, who are clinging to life by collecting paper and waste materials from the streets. Journalist Kasım Akan provides an example from Erzurum, where street vendors grow and sell inexpensive vital products that the lower income group can easily access during Corona crisis days.

Informal entrepreneurship is seen as a direct outcome of either the failure of formal institutions or the asymmetry between formal and informal institutions. These two viewpoints are so far debated as alternative theoretical explanations for the prevalence of informal entrepreneurship. In this paper, the authors offer a theoretically integrative approach to further advance the institutional perspective of informal entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

Using face-to-face surveys of 322 street entrepreneurs from Lahore, Pakistan, the authors deploy the hitherto unused partial least square approach (PLS) to structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze data within the field of informal entrepreneurship.

The empirical findings strongly support the theoretical propositions of the new institutional perspective that the authors present in their paper. The authors find no direct impact of factors like procedural justice, redistributive justice and public sector corruption (i.e. formal institutional failings) on the formalization intentions of street entrepreneurs. Their findings demonstrate that the relationship between formal institutional failings and formalization intentions can only be explained through the mediating role of institutional asymmetry (i.e. tax morality).

From a policy perspective, the authors find that if they can encourage street entrepreneurs to obtain a local-level registration as the first step toward formalization, it will significantly increase their chances to opt for higher national-level registrations.

This paper presents a unique attempt to further understand the context of street entrepreneurship through the theoretical lens of the institutional theory. In doing so, it synthesizes the arguments of existing institutional perspectives and further develops the institutional theory of informal entrepreneurship. Moreover, the paper develops the concept of “formalization intentions”.

This study aims to find out various dimensions of the risk and benefit perceptions of the consumers of street food vendors. It will identify the reasons which affect consumer’s attitude and consumption patterns towards street foods, which bring about changes in their behavioural intentions (repurchase intention and word of mouth intention).

Five risk and two benefit factors were tested on a factor model by exploratory factor analysis using 26 constructs. Two-step approach was followed in which measurement model, having six constructs with 17 measurement items, were assessed, followed by the structural model. This study explained that the consumer attitude is affected by perceived risks and benefits. Further, the risk perception negatively affects the behavioural intentions. A conceptual model was framed to depict the relationships among variables and was empirically tested.

The results indicate that risk and benefit perception of consumers are not only inter-related but also responsible for their changes in attitudes towards the street foods. In the factorial analysis, it was found that perceived benefit factors, i.e. convenience and value, are responsible for positively influencing the attitude of consumers towards street food. The findings indicate that reducing risk perception and increasing benefit perception will positively change the patron’s attitude.

The data collection was done through a structured questionnaire specifically drafted to collect the relevant data for the study from the 658 street food consumers in Delhi. To examine the factorability of 26 items of risk/benefit perception, 586 observations were used.

Traditionally, urban informality has been discussed in terms of housing and markets, usually along the periphery of urban areas where there is disinvestment and decline. This article looks at urban informality through the lens of informal fresh food retail throughout the city of Mumbai, India. In India, fresh produce has traditionally been sold in informal street markets comprising vendors that operate through carts and make-shift stalls set-up on the streets. This article aims to assess the conditions surrounding fresh produce retail that fuel its informality.

This study uses a mixed methods approach by spatially analyzing the location of informal fresh food vendors in ArcGIS, developing a qualitative analysis of the level of proliferation of this network through interviews conducted with vendors and conducting surveys of residents' access patterns and purchasing habits for fresh produce in the city.

Results from this study indicate that the role of density, transportation systems, domestic/household structure, cultural traditions and a bureaucratic system rife with its own challenges have resulted in a distinct infrastructure of food retail networks that has harvested forms of inequalities and injustices that inherently fuel this informal economy.

There is no published study to date that has been done to spatially assess the informal food network in any dense city in India, let alone Mumbai to date. Urban informality, by its nature, is hard to capture, and yet this study takes a holistic view of the food systems in Mumbai, by addressing the location, supply (through vendor interviews) and demand factors (through resident surveys).

Among the various global options for self-employment, venturing into the micro-enterprise sector has been recognized as an important way for employment generation and poverty alleviation in many developing/emerging economies. In this context, women-owned businesses at the grassroots play a vital role in developing countries like India far beyond contributing to job creation and economic growth. The informal sector is a sizeable and expanding feature of the contemporary global economy.

However, the informal economy operates at the cusp of the institutional framework, which makes them susceptible to many risks like lack of formal financing options, legal aid or increasing margin through access to formal markets. Non-Profit Development Agencies (NPDAs) have emerged as a viable and essential middle ground support in promoting women entrepreneurship in their capacity to contribute beyond governmental institutions.

The study adopted an inductive qualitative option through a case study design to explore the approaches adopted by NPDAs in promoting micro-entrepreneurship among women at the base of the pyramid (BoP) in the urban informal sector in India. The findings suggest that the NPDAs created an impact through the services, which translated into monetary earnings for the entrepreneurs. They could make financial contributions to their families, which boosted their self-confidence and overall personality. The findings also indicate positive changes like increased self-confidence, self-dependence, and inner strength as reported by the entrepreneurs.