How much is the annual income of a beggar in Bangalore?
You can assume anything and everything under the Sun, just to try to keep the assumptions close to reality
I always start with an equation, for this question the equation which I assumed was:-
Amount per day * Number of Calendar Days (365)
Assumption 1- A beggar begs all day of the year
Now, I have divided a complete day in 4 parts
6 am to 10 am – High income
10 am to 4 pm – Low income
4 pm to 10 pm – High income
10 pm to 6 am – No income
Assumption 2 – The beggar will bet more money in slot 1 and 3
Assumption 3 – Beggar interacts with 500 people in each slot
Assumption 4 – The success ratio table
Slot | Success Rate | Number of people giving money |
6 AM – 10 AM | 0.03 | 45 |
10 AM – 4 PM | 0.01 | 15 |
4 PM – 10 PM | 0.05 | 75 |
10 PM – 6 AM | 0.006 | 9 |
144 |
Assumption 5 – Probability of amount, I have safely assumed that 30% people will give Rs.2, 20% will give Rs.5 and 50% will give Rs.1
Slot | Success Rate | Number of people giving money | Amount |
6 AM – 10 AM | 0.03 | 45 | 94.5 |
10 AM – 4 PM | 0.01 | 15 | 31.5 |
4 PM – 10 PM | 0.05 | 75 | 157.5 |
10 PM – 6 AM | 0.006 | 9 | 18.9 |
144 | 302.4 |
Now we have Rs.302.4 per day income.
Annual amount = 302.4*365 = Rs. 110,376 It doesn’t matter if the amount is high or low, what matters is that you have an approach to solve the problem. Few more things which you can add here are:-
1. Divide the year into seasons
2. Divide year into weekend and weekdays
3. Public Holidays
Keep Learning 🙂
Nitin Kamal
Comment ( 1 )
No doubts on approach but I want to include few points –
1) In a metro city like Bangalore rarely you will find 1 rupee coin as common as 2 rupee coin since as per my experience in small towns, no one is accepting 1 rupee coin due to duplication. 2 rupee coin is acceptable.
2) Due to COVID 19 trend of electronic money has come into the habit 90% of people all over the world just not in India.
Doubt: Are the above factors not going to affect the approach of estimation ?