This paper, on the basis of a primary survey of cycle rickshaw pullers and rickshaw owners in Delhi, India, estimate the causal impact of the opening and extension of Delhi Metro on the rental rates of cycle rickshaws. The cycle rickshaw rental market provides employment opportunities for unskilled, assetless workers who have migrated from rural areas because of poverty. A change in this market is thus expected to affect both urban and rural poverty.

The majority of the world’s population now live in urban centres, which will also absorb virtually all population growth in the next century. Urbanisation involves major shifts in the ways people work and live, and offers unprecedented opportunities for improved standards of living, higher life expectancy and higher literacy levels, as well as better environmental sustainability and a more efficient use of increasingly scarce natural resources. For women, urbanisation is associated with greater access to employment opportunities, lower fertility levels and increased independence.

Keeping in view the significant proportion of workers in India engaged in the informal sector of the economy, a set of probing questions were asked to usual status workers engaged in non-agricultural sectors as well as agricultural sector (except those engaged in only growing of crops, market gardening, horticulture and growing of crops combined with farming of animals) to collect the information on the characteristics of the workers and the enterprises in which they worked.

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), as a part of its 66th round survey programme during the period July 2009 - June 2010, carried out an all-India household survey on the subject of employment and unemployment in India. In this survey, the nation-wide enquiry was conducted to generate estimates of various characteristics pertaining to employment and unemployment and labour force characteristics at the national and State levels.

Could the informal economy be the route to deliver the big sustainable development ideals such as the Green Economy, Millennium Development Goals and Poverty Reduction Strategies, given that its share is rapidly increasing and that the poor mostly operate here? In some developing countries, the share of the informal economy is greater than that of the formal economy.