Most Indians took it for granted that the national Capital would be cleared temporarily of hawkers and small vendors, along with beggars and vagrants, ahead of the Commonwealth Games. This is standard operating procedure before a big global event. The moral argument for these periodical eviction drives can be endlessly debated. But the bigger issue is whether local governments should radically reconsider their approach to these people. There is no doubt that hawkers at the weekly flea markets, fruit and vegetable vendors, household helps and so on — who broadly fall under the category that economists call the “urban informal sector” — remain the most marginalised people in Indian urban environments. The tony glass and concrete offices and malls may stand as monuments to India’s new-found entrepreneurial spirit, but it’s the informal sector that still drives the country’s urban economies. It plays a critical role that gets noticed only in its absence — witness the righteous outrage by wealthy residents of Gurgaon when their chauffeurs and cleaners were caught in last week’s eviction drive.
To be sure, the urban informal sector isn’t aesthetically pleasing. Its shops and establishments sprawl all over pavements and free spaces, making easy movement impossible for pedestrian and wheeled traffic alike. They draw power illegally from the grid. They litter. They inhabit festering slums of the kind so darkly portrayed in Slumdog Millionaire. But without them, India’s expanding and increasingly prosperous middle class would be hard-pressed to get on with the business of growing wealthier. Yet, they remain the most vulnerable to the venality of local municipal and enforcement authorities. Take the case of Delhi alone. The city has over 500,000 vendors and one million rickshaw pullers. In her book Deepening Democracy — Challenges of Governance and Globalisation in India, activist Madhu Kishwar pointed out that only 4,000 vendors actually hold licences and that only courtesy a reference from a bureaucrat or an MLA. The rest exist solely by virtue of paying extortion money — Ms Kishwar has calculated that Rs 40 crore is being extorted from Delhi’s hawkers every month. This fact is unlikely to surprise too many city dwellers. The disappearance of local markets in formal clean-up drives and their reappearance days later is too regular an occurrence to merit comment — reformatory efforts do little more than up the bribery rates. As much to the point, the taxes that this sector should be legally paying city authorities and utility companies are being pocketed by public servants, creating a vicious circle of corruption and deterioration of municipal services.
The solution is glaringly obvious. As is done the world over, including China, urban authorities “formalise” the informal sector by demarcating specific zones for them, providing basic facilities in return for a fee and raising the cost of non-compliance. These movements have not only cleaned up the cities and provided legitimate wealth-creating avenues for the “little people”, they add an engaging dimension to the urban landscape without detracting from the virtues of cleanliness. Efforts in parts of Delhi have shown that the plan is workable. The trouble is that the change agents are always up against powerful vested interests that gain from keeping the informal sector informal.
