There are about 12 million to 14 million kirana shops—family-run corner-shops/mom-and-pop or convenience stores selling groceries and other products—across India (according to this 2015 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, with India Retail Forum), and they are vulnerable to losses from ‘notebandi’—as demonetisation is called colloquially. A population, roughly speaking, equivalent to that of France or Thailand, depends on these stores for a living.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an address to the nation six days after the original notebandi announcement, requested 50 days (up to December 30, 2016) to restore normalcy.
On days 54 and 55, IndiaSpend visited 24 mom-and-pop shops in Mumbai and semi-urban, peri-urban and rural areas north to it, to assess notebandi‘s impact on small retail stores. We found that across Palghar, Thane and Mumbai districts of the Mumbai metropolitan region:
