Over 20 lakh street vendors have applied for interest-free loans of Rs 10,000 each as working capital under the Prime Minister Street Vendor’s Atmanirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi). They were among the hardest hit by the Covid lockdown. And now, many of them are hoping that a special loan scheme rolled out by the government will

There are an estimated 50-60 lakh street vendors in India, with the largest concentrations in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad. Most of them are migrants who typically work for 10–12 hours every day on average. On Tuesday (October 27), Prime Minister Narendra Modi, through video conferencing, distributed loans to nearly 300,000 street vendors