Financial Literacy of Street Vendors

Abstract

Street vendors form a sector in the unorganized market of India. The advent of online payment, through platforms such as Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay has helped them in understanding online finance, and assisted their business; however, there are milestones yet to be made in enhancing their financial literacy overall. As a part of this paper, we conducted a survey, not of the vendors themselves, but of certain members of the general public within our contact. It is known that the vendors lack a certain standard of living, and the survey was conducted in the direction of the public. We found that 58.3% of the respondents thought that the vendors contributed to the cultural vibrancy of the community, and that 75% of them thought that literacy was necessary. Despite this, 75% of them believed that the lack of education was the biggest barrier in financial literacy. It is our hope that this barrier ceases to exist for the vendors.