We are the 92 percent

92 percent of India's workforce is in the informal sector/System D. That's 460 million people. But, as this op-ed from My Digital Financial Chronicle points out, "from a rights perspective, this simply means that the ‘formal’ sector policeman can evict the ‘informal’ sector vegetable vendor from the street corner near your house on a whim."


India's National Association of Street Vendors is trying to re-engineer the way the government thinks about street vendors and other System D workers and to reverse years of systematic repression and discrimination.

(note: a few weeks back, I blogged about a different article that said 94 percent of India's workforce was informal. 94, 92: the exact number is impossible to gauge. But they're both amazingly huge numbers. System D thoroughly dominates the Indian labor market. It's time to stop criminalizing these efforts.)