Estimating Informal-Economy Gross Value Added for Bengaluru, 2025–26

This paper estimates the informal-economy Gross Value Added (GVA) for Bengaluru during the Fiscal Year 2025–26 through a bottom-up income approach. While India’s informal economy constitutes the majority of its workforce, it remains unrepresented in official output data, with no data available for individual cities. A total of 85 individual worker records and 326 cohort-level observations were collected through field surveys in Whitefield, which is a sub-region in eastern Bengaluru known for its dense informal economy in close proximity to a large formal economy information-technology sector. Wages observed in the field were incorporated along with benchmarks into estimates that aggregate 13 worker categories to arrive at informal-economy GVA via value-added multipliers from the NSS 73rd Round enterprise survey. These estimates were extrapolated to the size of the entire informal economy using a coverage factor made up of six independent measures.