Business & Management Studies

Financial digital divide and Indian street vendors: An ethnographic study

Financial digital divide and Indian street vendors: An ethnographic study

The leading cause of digital payment hesitancy is primarily two-dimensional – one linked to distrust in the digital payment system and the other to the shared economic setting.

Authors

Shashi Kant Srivastava, Indian Institute of Management, Himachal Pradesh, Sirmaur, India.

Sandeep Singh, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Business School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.

Summary

Our study investigates the causal connection of the financial digital divide among Indian street vendors. With ever-increasing digital payments, integrating this social segment is a big challenge, and its impact may bolster the Indian economy many-fold. Knowing the causal mechanism of such a digital divide may equip us to intervene. We conducted an ethnographic study in a small city with less than 50,000 population, among the street vendors who are mainly at the base of the pyramid and others surrounding him in his shared economy.

We found that the leading cause of digital payment hesitancy is primarily two-dimensional. One depends on the vendor’s internal factor and is mainly his distrust in the digital payment system, which generates due to their limited knowledge and skill. The second rests on the factors contributed by the environment of his shared economic setting.

Published in: AIP Conference Proceedings, International Conference on ICT Integration in Technical Education, ETLTC 2023 in collaboration with the 2nd International Conference on Entertainment Technology and Management, ICETM 2023, Aizuwakamatsu, 24 January 2023 through 27 January 2023.

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