How it started
A folder full of unpaid bills.
It began in a narrow lane in Aminabad. Pranav was walking from shop to shop with a notebook, asking one simple question: which government rule has changed your business the most?
Near the end of the lane, a chikankari trader didn't answer straight away. He reached under his counter and pulled out a thick folder of invoices, all for kurtas he had supplied months earlier and still hadn't been paid for. "On paper, I should be paid in forty-five days," he said. "Here, nobody has ever seen forty-five days." He had borrowed money to buy fresh fabric, and the interest was eating whatever profit was left.
The rule was written to protect him. On the street, it barely reached him.
It wasn't one trader's bad luck. In Hazratganj and Chowk, the same pattern kept appearing: good intentions in the rulebook, very different results at the counter. One notebook could never carry all those stories to the people who write the rules. So Pranav designed a proper survey, trained a few friends to run it, and started counting. That count became Civitas.
