India's street vendors feel the economic woes

A year ago MG Road, the bustling main thoroughfare of Mumbai's historic business district of Fort, was full of shoppers haggling with street vendors over everything from replica Prada sunglasses to underwear.

However, since the start of the global economic crisis and the terrorist attacks last November, all one can see on MG Road are hundreds of street hawkers shouting "buy one get one free!" into a nearly empty street.

"The market is very low, and business is going down because of the big crisis," said Moin Zariwala, a T-shirt vendor working under the sweeping arcades of the neo-Gothic colonial era buildings that line MG Road. "One year ago, I was running very successfully, but now sales have gone down 50 per cent."

India's economy is expected to slow sharply in 2009, shattering its hopes of reaching double digit growth. The overwhelming majority of analysts predict that gross domestic product growth will fall well below 5 per cent.

"Building in weaker domestic as well as external demand, we are cutting our GDP growth estimate for 2009 again to 4.3 per cent from 5.3 per cent. We expect recovery in 2010 to 6.1 per cent," said Chetan Ahya at Morgan Stanley.

High food and oil prices were blamed as the culprits of the economic slowdown, although most shop keepers agreed that the Mumbai terrorist attacks, where more than 170 were killed, made things even worst.

"Business went down nearly 95 per cent in the weeks after attacks…now it's picking up again, but it's still less than last year," said Imran Khan, who sells imitation jewellery in Colaba, close to the marble halls of the Taj Mahal hotel that were targeted by the terrorists.

Many people with small shops have been forced to diversify their business to cut costs due to the financial crisis.

Bhavin Shah ran a food shop in south Mumbai, but has now switched to selling plywood.

"We had eight employees for the food shop, and it was too expensive for us as we were not making any profit," said Mr Shah. "Food often expired and we had to throw it away. Plywood doesn't expire, plus, now only my dad and I take care of the shop."

Salim Abubackar, who has a camera kiosk, said that he started offering repair services as his sales of new digital cameras fell at least 50 per cent. "Repair business is good because more people want to use their old machines. There's no money for new ones."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009