The other day, we were driving on the Barapulla elevated road when a stall laden with seductively orange papayas caught our attention. It was in Sewa Nagar's Prabhu Market, and we stopped for a closer look. As it turned out, the papayas were great but their seller Shri Ram was even more interesting. A vocal supporter of street vendors' rights, he was the president of the Footpath Vikreta Ekta Manch. As we got talking about the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill passed by the Lok Sabha this September, he explained how this was a watershed moment in the history of street vending or tehbazari in India.
"People often call street vendors a problem. I say, we are the solution!" said Shri Ram. In a city with more migrants than employment opportunities, street vending offered people the chance to make a dignified living, he said. The substantial reduction in the number of cottage industries within cities such as Delhi has shrunk the job market, especially for illiterate migrants. As a result, there are over 350,000 street vendors in Delhi alone, selling vegetables, fruits, juice, eggs, sweets, cloth, utensils and more on the street. What was more, he said, millions of urban poor across India bought their daily necessities from the street at prices more affordable than those in stores. We looked around the well-regulated street market (incidentally the first in the city to have solar lighting) and agreed that indeed, with the right planning, hawkers could add considerable value to urban spaces.
"Yet, we vendors have been victimised and driven out from our stalls, forced to pay extortionate bribes to the MCD and the police, and treated like criminals!," said Shri Ram. The story he narrated was all too familiar. Before the Commonwealth Games, this entire market was asked to shift its venue since it posed a security risk being too close to the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. For the next two months, most vendors could not do any business since they were not allowed to set up their stalls anywhere else either. "After the Games, when we tried to return, we found that the entire area had been revamped and that our licences weren't valid anymore," he said. The 50-odd vendors of the market were distraught. They went from pillar to post but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Eventually, they approached the National Association of Street Vendors, the apex body looking after their interests. The organisation introduced them to the lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan who filed a case for them in the High Court against the police and the MCD in 2011, and obtained a stay order. "Today, because we are united under the banner of Footpath Vikreta Ekta Manch, we have some security. But any day, if the stay order is revoked, we could find ourselves out of our stalls again..." he said.
That is why Shri Ram and other stall owners at Prabhu Market are waiting anxiously for the Street Vendors Bill. "The Bill will prevent repetitions of the Prabhu Market incident," he said. "It has adequate grievance redressal mechanisms. Most important, we will no longer be at the mercy of the civic authorities - according to it, each vendor will be given a licence and specific vending zones will be set up in every city." If implemented well, this could give India's 10 million-odd urban street vendors the chance to ply their trade peacefully and a level playing field to coexist with supermarkets and malls. Shri Ram said in a parting shot: "I hope that at least this Bill makes people recognise street vending as a legitimate source of livelihood... and more importantly, that we vendors have rights too!"
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