The leftist government of West Bengal is atoning for its past sins as it heads towards defeat after a long stint in power, much like a person doing good deeds after a long life of waywardness in order to show something for himself when he meets his maker. It has approved a policy to legalise hawkers, bring them under a regulatory framework and also do something for their long-term future.
The policy is not yet law but the legislation, when it comes, is unlikely to be opposed as the state’s hawkers have slowly acquired de facto legitimacy. Over a decade ago, the leftist government, believing itself to be firmly in power and heeding the middle class’ opposition to the “menace” of hawkers, decided to clean up Kolkata’s streets by launching Operation Sunshine. Scribes like me wrote glowingly about it but the sun soon set on the exercise. The Trinamool Congress, a long-term friend of hawkers, is unlikely to make the same mistake as the leftists did by turning against hawkers once it is firmly in power.
So, hawkers in the state are there to stay as will also, in all probability, its urban squalor and appalling standards of local governance. Unfortunately, hawkers seem to represent a zero-sum game. Ban them and you are guilty of taking away the livelihoods of many at the bottom of the pyramid in a poor country. Allow them to ply their trade and you say goodbye to clean, modern, well-run towns and cities.
But it need not be so. You can have both hawkers and clean, well-run cities which are colourful and culturally rich. It is difficult to beat the street food of Gujarat, or the phuchka (golgappa) and paratha “rolls” of Kolkata. But they need not have to be allowed to make and leave behind a filthy mess everyday.
West Bengal’s Left Front government, in the eleventh hour of its life, has come out with a fairly sensible policy. Urban areas will be demarcated into effectively green, amber and red zones for the purpose of hawkers where they will be free to trade, have restricted access or none at all. Also, critically, hawkers will be allowed only on one side of pavements, and not permitted to take up more than a third of the pavement space. Permitted space per hawker will be between 15 and 40 sq ft.
Most important for hawkers, they will get identity cards and become eligible for social security benefits. Those who read business newspapers and worry about the fiscal deficit (pain is good or greed is good, depending on at what stage you are in the business cycle) will not be happy with the last part. But it is possible to see hawkers as economic agents who, through their entrepreneurship and risk-taking (they don’t get dole), play a legitimate economic role and create wealth, both for themselves and you and me who buy their affordable wares.
It is possible to think of a hawker with a unique identity, a municipality-issued identity card and a designated five-by-three or eight-by-five corner of a pavement to call his own, to go for a bank or microfinance loan the same way a sharecropper does. Who knows, some day business newspapers could be celebrating the rise of at least a few from next-to-the-gutters to the corner offices of glass and concrete corporate piles.
The way to have cities which are both inclusive and livable, from which you do not run away (vote with your feet) as soon as you have made your pile, is to run them sensibly and efficiently. The usual Indian middle class lament is, “oh, the municipality is so inefficient and corrupt”, but the root cause is that the middle class is so disengaged. In virtually every urban neighbourhood in the country, the level of cleanliness is directly proportional to the activeness of the local residents’ welfare association, formal or informal. Cities like Chicago and Barcelona, which have acquired global fame for successfully rejuvenating themselves, have done so bottom upwards.
If hawkers have to live and let the rest of the citizens live, then it is the latter who have to keep a constant vigil. Sooner or later, there should be lines painted on pavements to make sure the one-third-of-the-pavement rule is not transgressed. And the waste generated by the hawkers, particularly those selling food, should be cleared not once but twice a day. In fact, hawkers’ associations can be made responsible for sweeping the pavement, collecting the waste and taking it to the nearest collection points from where municipal trucks should pick up the garbage twice a day.
The professional classes — engaged citizens, designers and corporates — should start a national competition for designing a cart for hawkers. There can be a mother design from which can evolve specialised designs for carts for different wares like food, clothes and soft drinks. There should be storage space below the tabletop and colourful awnings on top to give some protection for both the hawker and the customer from the sun and the rain. And the carts should be on proper wheels so that at night they can be taken away and parked at a local parking area where the wares stored in them are safe, and the emptied pavements can be thoroughly cleaned and even washed by the municipal staff.
Now that I have retired, I want to sit behind a cart selling second-hand books, some of them collected from friends who are forced to sell them to the bikriwala on being threatened by the wives that either the books spilling over from the shelves go or they go.
