Only 10 percent of India's workers have jobs in the formal economy.
Over the next decade much of the formal economy was destroyed in the country's civil war.
Much lending and borrowing of course occurred outside the formal economy.
Similar networks are often used by other ethnic groups to acquire the skills and the resources to surface in the formal economy.
Prohibition created a black market that competed with the formal economy, which already was under pressure.
That is a significant source of employment in a country where the formal, legal economy employs five million people.
But there have always been some whose wounds make it impossible for them to adjust to the formal economy.
However, these labor regulations are not effectively enforced outside of the formal economy.
Employment is rising and people are returning to the formal economy.
About 48% of those in the total workforce do not have work in the formal economy.