Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal account for highest number of street vendors in India: SBI economists

Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal are home to the highest number of street vendors, collectively accounting for over one-fourth of the country's tally, economists at State Bank of India (SBI) said on Friday. According to a note released a day after the government announced a Rs 5,000-crore special credit facility for street vendors, ten states accounted for 35 lakh of the 50 lakh beneficiary street vendors who will be given a loan of Rs 10,000 each to restart businesses impacted by the lockdowns.

Uttar Pradesh has 7.8 lakh vendors, while West Bengal follows with 5.5 lakh, it said, adding that the two states collectively command a 27 per cent share of the overall number. Bihar has 5.3 lakh vendors, Rajasthan 3.1 lakh, Maharashtra 2.9 lakh, Tamil Nadu 2.8 lakh, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka at 2.1 lakh each, Gujarat 2 lakh, Kerala and Assam at 1.9 lakh each, Odisha 1.7 lakh, Haryana 1.5 lakh, and Madhya Pradesh and Punjab at 1.4 lakh each. The economists said they depended on the self-employed in non-agriculture sector data from the periodic labour force surveys to arrive at the estimates.

Welcoming the move of introducing the 'one-nation, one-ration card' concept, it said the government will have to build the necessary technological architecture in the 5.27 lakh fair price shops at the earliest to make it operational. The direct fiscal impact of the package announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday is only up to Rs 14,750 crore or 0.07 per cent of the GDP, as a bulk of the Rs 3.16 lakh crore of announcements is aspects like guarantees, it said. Till now, the cumulative fiscal impact of all the three packages announced by Sitharaman to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is Rs 1.29 lakh crore or 0.6 per cent of the GDP.

The economists marginally upped the country's fiscal deficit estimate for FY21 to 8 per cent of the GDP as against 7.9 per cent earlier. The slippage will largely be on account of lower revenues and higher expenditure as a result of the pandemic, the note said. With the schemes announced on Thursday also including a Rs 30,000 crore additional refinance support from Nabard for crop loans written by lenders, the economists said there is a likelihood of another Rs 30,000 crore in liquidity support being made available to the agri-focused institution from RBI over and above the earlier announcement of Rs 25,000 crore.

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