Most middle-class people in them will vociferously protest the way hawkers are spreading across pavements and parts of the road. In Kolkata this hawker "menace" has reached epidemic proportions. But it is the same middle class which provides custom to the hawkers, making them belligerently fight for the right to ply their trade wherever they can.
The inexorable logic of this contradiction led to a unique bandh in Kolkata a few weeks ago. Shop owners in the city's iconic New Market, once the poshest shopping area in town, and several shopping complexes nearby in what is the heart of town, downed shutters for three days to protest against the way hawkers were taking over the area.
After having a free run of the pavements, they have now occupied virtually the entire carriageway of most roads around the area so that cars have to move slowly in single file. Parking a car even in a designated area is virtually impossible, thanks to hawkers spreading their wares there. Over time the established shop owners have seen their business decline.
Bargain hunters and those less well off throng the area, making it almost inaccessible to others, and giving the area a slowly more and more downmarket feel. The shop owners went on strike as they saw an imminent threat to their business and livelihood. The irony is that such a strike has taken place not while the Left Front, the keepers of the poor like hawkers, were in power but when the Trinamool Congress was.
The final irony is that, on the last day of the shop owners' strike, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee called hawkers to a public meeting, promised them registration and, to top it up, a range of modest social security benefits like pension and medical insurance. The registration documents will be distributed by the Bengali new year in April 2016. Shortly thereafter, the state will go to the polls on completing five years of Trinamool rule. The chief minister also told the hawkers: don't hawk in front of shops, don't encroach on carriageways and leave a part of pavements for pedestrians.
Her senior Cabinet colleague, Subrata Mukherjee, who has earlier been arguably the most successful mayor of the city in living memory, who was with the chief minister, told the hawkers they would not be evicted from roads and pavements. The hawkers, who had come for the meeting with trepidation, went away dancing.
Middle-class people saw this as one more nail in the coffin of the city. If the don'ts the chief minister has enumerated are enforced by the administration, there should be no problem - but credibility in this regard is zero.
If you think all hawkers' leaders are irresponsible you are mistaken. Shaktiman Ghosh, veteran hawkers' leader and general secretary of the Hawker Sangram Committee, was remarkably balanced and cogent. "It is a question of livelihood for the hawkers. We have to reach a middle ground. Those who hawk at important street crossings or on roads are not friends of hawkers. I see nothing wrong with the New Market traders' strike."
He then pointedly asked: where is the town vending committee? After a long period in hibernation, Parliament had last year finally passed a law both legalising and regulating street vendors so that they are not harassed by police and touts and simultaneously do not become a law unto themselves, creating unbearable urban chaos.
The legislation, now on the statue books, calls for states and urban local bodies to create town vending committees, with hawkers' representatives on them, which will register hawkers. Plus, and this is critical, there will be a street vending plan, to be revised every five years, which will demarcate public places into three categories: vending freely allowed, restricted and not allowed. Equally important, the law says vendors do not have permanent rights and can be relocated.
At the heart of this urban chaos is the classical "soft state" which is the hallmark of underdeveloped societies ruled by either dictators or populist maverick politicians who neither know nor are willing to learn how to run a proper administration. Ms Banerjee left the imprint of her administrative abilities or the lack of them on the railways, which were set on the road to financial crisis every time she or her nominated partymen held the portfolio at the centre.
For Kolkata's nearly 300,000 hawkers, their stalls are a way to keep destitution at bay for them and the 1.5 million people who are part of their families. But if there is no control on hawkers they will eventually clog not just pavements but roads too. Then nobody will be able to get to the hawkers by either public or private transport and the city will return to the pre-industrial age when people moved by only foot.
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