EDITORIALS

The Right to Sell

The law legalising street vending is welcome and comes not a day too soon.

he union minister for housing and urban poverty alleviation, Ajay Maken, believes that the urban poor have a right to conduct trade and business, even if it is on the street. He is willing to back this by bringing in a law that gives them the right. Thus, the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill, 2012, introduced by Makens predecessor Kumari Selja in the Lok Sabha in August last year, is due to be passed with a couple of amendments in the current budget session. The journey towards such a law began many years ago, with a Supreme Court ruling in 1985 and culminating in 2009 in the National Policy on Urban Street Vendors. Yet, despite the increasing acceptance by policymakers at the centre that street vendors are not only a fact of life in Indian cities but should be allowed to conduct their business by law, the reality in most cities is vastly different. Mumbai, for instance, has the largest number of street vendors, estimated to be around 3,00,000. However, only around 10% of them are legal in that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has given them licences. The majority of them are deemed illegal. Yet for decades, they have conducted their business by paying the local police and municipal employees varying amounts. Ironically, the BMC charges some of them for unauthorised occupation and refuse removal charges on a daily basis and even issues receipts. In other words, while continuing to call them illegal, it legally collects daily nes from them. Instead, if these vendors were given licences, the monetary gain to the BMC would be substantially more. Yet, it continues to keep its head rmly in the sand and allows this apparent illegality to ourish and grow. By doing so, it can keep for itself the right to arbitrarily decide when and how often it will deal with the illegals. Thus, almost on a daily basis in some part of the city, it conducts raids, conscates the goods of these socalled illegal vendors, destroys their temporary shops and clears up the pavements. For these forays, a section of middleclass citizens applauds the BMC and urges it on. But within days, it is business as usual as the vendors return, pay their regular dues to their protectors in the police and the municipality and wait with trepidation for another round of demolitions. Regularising street vending is not easy. Cities like Mumbai are crowded. Pavements are often non-existent. Where they exist, there is sometimes no place for people to walk as street vendors occupy the pavements. As the majority of people in the city

use public transport, this does inconvenience pedestrians. Yet repeated surveys have shown that pedestrians actually support the existence of street vendors as they provide services and goods at more affordable prices than the formal trade and retail sector. The location of street vendors around railway stations, for instance, is welcomed by women commuters in particular because they supply goods, including vegetables and other perishables, on a daily basis and at a convenient location and also make these areas much safer late into the evening. Apart from anything else, street vending has been recognised as an avenue for direct employment for lakhs of people who would otherwise be without work. In the absence of a safety net of any other kind, this provides the urban poor with a source of income for basic subsistence. For that reason alone, the proposed law is welcome. It recognises the right of the street vendor to livelihood. It suggests a system for local governments to follow so that street vending can be regularised. Municipalities are expected to set up Town Vending Committees that will include members of hawkers unions and civil society organisations. Rather than leaving it to bureaucrats and local politicians to decide, the law tasks this committee to work out areas that can be designated as vending and non-vending zones, criteria for issuing licences and suspending them, licence fees and nes and a grievance redressal system. Although it still grants powers to local governments to relocate vendors and to conscate the goods of unlicensed vendors, it also recognises the right of a licensed vendor to an alternative location. Thus, if the local authorities decide to change the designation of an area, it is incumbent on them to relocate all the licensed hawkers elsewhere. The proposed law might not be perfect and will certainly prove a challenge to implement given the way local governments function. But it is setting the right precedent. It acknowledges the right of the urban poor to a source of livelihood and at the same time encourages municipalities to work out regulations so that street vending can be legalised without inconveniencing peoples ability to move around the city. Surely, that is not such an impossible task to contemplate, given the many examples from other developing countries where this has been worked out. What has been missing so far is the willingness to grant the urban poor the same rights as any other resident of a city.
march 16, 2013 vol xlviII no 11
EPW Economic & Political Weekly