In 2007, Hari (name changed) and his older brother came to Mumbai from a village near Varanasi. His brother succumbed to malaria; Hari went home, married his brother’s widow, adopted his son and returned to Mumbai. He sells coconut water, as his brother did, at the corner of a dilapidated building in Santacruz East, switching to roasted corn cobs during the rains.
Later, he brought his two younger brothers to Mumbai, supporting one’s training as an electrician. By 2013, Hari had a daughter. With his savings and a loan from an uncle, he bought a small room in Titwala for ₹1 lakh, and was able to bring his family to Mumbai.
In Santacruz, he says, “People from three buildings call out to me whenever they need any help.” The residents know he is unlicensed, “but they consider me one of their own, and I feel the same. One of them was kind enough to refer me to open a bank account, even though I did not have a single document.” His son is topping his class, and like any parent, he wants the best for his family. “But the fear of being chased away persists.”
At least once a month, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s grey van rounds up hawkers. “It’s a loss of a day’s business retrieving my wares.” This despite him paying ₹100 hafta [weekly bribe] to a cop whose beat he is on. “During the monsoon,” he says, “BMC took away the corncobs I was selling, along with the table. I managed to hide my stove. By evening, I got my corn back, but they kept back my table.” He could not pay the ₹1,200 fine, but a bribe of ₹500, all he had, worked.
Hari’s story could be about any of Mumbai’s lakhs of hawkers: mostly with negligible education, a significant chunk of them migrants from poor parts of the country, a part of the ecosystem, but without legal standing, always fighting just for the right to exist.
Always on the edge
In 1998, a Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) survey of hawkers tallied 1,04,000 of them. (It only covered streets overseen by the BMC, which excludes MHADA land, railway land — including pedestrian bridges — and Port Trust areas, so the actual number would have been much higher.) Today, says Raju Bhise, a development consultant and former director of YUVA, the numbers of hawkers within city limits would easily be 3 lakh.
There is legislation setting out the rights of hawkers and street vendors (the Street Vendors Act; see box, ‘The evolution of the law’), including licensing, and provisions that vendors cannot be evicted without prior notice, and that seized goods can be recovered after payment of a fine. In reality, BMC squads strike without warning, and goods can be released with a little palm-greasing.
Hawkers usually can’t get jobs because of limited education and skills, Mr. Bhise says; they have negligible capital and the financial services sector isn’t welcoming, so buying space for a shop in a legally constructed building is impossible. So is getting a hawking licence — “No new licences have been issued since almost four decades now” — theferore only about 15,000 hawkers are legal. For the rest, “They eke out their living by paying a hafta [weekly bribe] of about ₹100 to the police and BMC.” Multiply that by those estimated 3 lakh hawkers, he says, and you have a bribe economy of ₹3 crore a week, ₹156 crore a year.
Dr. R.N. Sharma, professor at TISS, has a more conservative estimate in his paper, The Politics of Urban Space — ₹120 crore of bribes annually — and contrasts it with the ₹11 crore to ₹12 crore collected by the city from hawkers, through licence fees, fines and charges for the redemption of confiscated goods.
Unsurprisingly, Deepak Devraj, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Operations), and spokesperson for Mumbai police, claims to know nothing of the hafta practice.
Starved for space
One reason for no new licences being issued is the lack of space.
There is cause to point a finger at lawmakers for not taking the opportunity to reserve space when it was possible, at least in the erstwhile mills district.
In 1996, the Maharashtra government appointed a committee, headed by renowned architect and urban planner Charles Correa, to plan the redevelopment of 600 acres of mill land in Parel. Simpreet Singh, an urban issues activist researching land and livelihood issues at Critical Art and Media Practices (CAMP), says the committee’s report envisaged a new kind of economy as well as a spike in the number of workers, but it was never acted on. “Mr. Correa had suggested that streets around Lower Parel and Elphinstone Road stations be developed into a pedestrian plaza. Instead, several structures by Indiabulls came up, and there is no facility to get to the main road apart from a narrow walkway. The development, contrary to what Correa had suggested, was selective.” Bluntly put, more equitable planning would have meant that property developers would have got less land and made less money.
V.K. Phatak, urban planner and former chief town planner, MMRDA, who was part of Mr. Correa’s group, says, “The study and report covered only mills under National Textile Corporation. The study should have been for the entire district, as there are several non-mill areas. Sadly, the focus was only on the redevelopment of individual mills. Also, our writing was conceptual and it lacked providing regulatory and statutory recommendations.”
The issue is a lack of space, Mr. Phatak agrees, but urban planning has to be addressed from the lens of conflict resolution. “[The BMC’s] development plan is too broad, and does not address localised issues, where the conflict for space is very intense, like at railway stations, slums, chawls and the mills district.” Solutions would be complex, necessitating consensus building. “Even if a politician or corporator takes the lead, s/he would need a plan that balances everyone’s needs and expectations. Very few urban planners within BMC and CIDCO have been trained in urban planning, so their ideas are only conceptual.”
Mr. Bhise points out that though the city is creating parking, it remains lenient with private vehicles illegally parked on streets: “The message is, there is space for a luxurious lifestyle, but not for livelihood.”
Prior to the Street Vendors Act, the BMC and a vending committee had demarcated hawking zones, but these were too small to accommodate even existing hawkers. The Act removed the concept of hawking zones, but the Town Vending Committees it mandated — and the survey and steps towards addressing regularisation of hawkers — has not been implemented.
The will to enforce provisions of the Act is absent, Mr. Bhise says: charging hawkers a fee is in the Act, and has been implemented in Bhubaneswar and Imphal. But this would break the hafta system and other corruption. “The same bribe can be turned into income for the BMC. But that would mean freeing space that the MCGM, police and real estate lobby wouldn’t want to easily give away.”
An essential service
Ranjit Dhakane, Deputy Municipal Commissioner (Removal of Encroachments), says, after the Act was passed, the BMC made rules in 2016 and, early this year, a draft scheme, which awaits government approval. “The Act might mention prior notices for eviction, but since there are no rules in place, we are going by previous orders of a no-tolerance attitude.” He says Mumbai’s streets are not meant for cooking: “Our responsibility is not towards hawkers, only towards citizens.”
But Mr. Singh of CAMP says, “The conflict of hawker and pedestrians is a myth; pedestrians use hawkers.” He points to Vashi station: “There is ample space outside, because CIDCO envisaged Vashi as a nodal point. Beyond the station, the plaza, with shops, a garden and street furniture, accommodates the idea that people do not merely use a railway station as a transit point, but also as a place to buy wares, meet people and more. Movement behaviour has been accounted for.” Hawkers, he says, are part of “natural markets” that evolve when there are pedestrians. “The evolution of natural markets is a fundamental economic aspect of demand and supply. Evicting hawkers is tantamount to not understanding the demands of consumers.”
Outside IndiaBulls Finance Centre, consumers agree.
Munching a vada pav, Rahul Vohra, sales professional and a regular commuter to Parel from Bhayander, says he can’t afford ₹100 a day on restaurants. “These hawkers are providing me a service, and to blame them for what goes wrong is the government’s way of shirking responsibility.”
Priyanka Patil, a housekeeping staffer at IndiaBulls, has stopped for a quick bite at a bhel stall before rushing to her second job. “If the hawkers aren’t here, it will not only affect their livelihood, but my own health too.”
At a tea stall where executives from nearby towers come for tea and cigarette breaks, Smithin Nair, a Yes Bank employee, says, “The government should issue licences so that they are not asked to drop their livelihood.” As for the stampede, “It would have taken place even if there were no hawkers.”
A part of the community
Inclusive thinkers agree that even in a space-starved city, hawkers are a crucial part of the ecosystem, and must survive and thrive.
An example comes from an unlikely area: posh Malabar Hill’s Little Gibbs Road. Nearly 17 years ago, a resident, Indrani Malkani, got her neighbours to view hawkers as providers, and integrated 40 of them into the community. “These hawkers had been there for several years,” she recalls. Ms. Malkani insisted on just one rule: no new hawkers allowed in the location demarcated.
She is also one of the members in the High Court-appointed monitoring committee for Girgaum Chowpatty, which was able to ensure a separate hawker zone, allowing wider access to the beach. “Nothing can come up on Chowpatty without our approval,” she says. “We have framed the rules and are stringent about them. The result is that the maintenance is a matter of pride for BMC.” The idea was later implemented in Juhu Beach.
More such solutions, which involve all the stakeholders and that recognise the importance of hawkers to our lives, seem to be the only way forward.
Post script
After the recent Elphinstone Road station tragedy, some said hawkers contributed to the overcrowding. On October 5, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, always happy to find a stick to hit the Shiv Sena with, threatened that if the hawkers were not removed within 15 days, it would take the law into its own hands. On Saturday, MNS ‘workers’ attacked hawkers outside several stations.
Once more, street vendors were a handy scapegoat for politicians scoring points.
Rambabu Gupta, of Lohia Vichar Manch, a hawkers’ union, says police personnel saw what was going on, but did nothing. “All the hawkers unions are planning a morcha at Azad Maidan on November 1, but we are yet to finalise the details.”
***
The evolution of the law
The long battle for legitimacy is wearying for old hands. In 1998, Rambabu Gupta, founder of Lohia Vichar Manch, a union based on the principles of Ram Manohar Lohia, sat on a weeklong hunger strike in Delhi, to get the attention of then-PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He did get to meet him: “I told Vajpayee sahab, ‘There are four crore hawkers in India, so if you listen to them, you are listening to 16 crore voters.’ There has been progress in the two decades since, but it has been slow.
In 1995, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) convened a meeting of 27 street vendor representatives from 11 cities in five continents in Bellagio, Italy, which formed StreetNet, an international alliance, and issued the International Declaration of Street Vendors.
The Bellagio Declaration urged governments to form national policies for hawkers and vendors “by making them a part of the broader structural policies aimed at improving their standards of living.” It asked, among other things, for vendors to be given legal status through laws, issuing licences and providing appropriate hawking zones, and making them a component of urban development plans.
In 1998, SEWA, with street vendors and other organisations, formed the National Association of Street Vendors of India. The need was, said Ela Bhatt, founder of SEWA, to make politicians see vendors “not just as vote banks, but as contributors to a new India.”
In 2001, the Central government formed a Task Force, and subsequently, a National Policy was introduced in 2004, which called for the streamlining of eviction as well the rehabilitation of hawkers.
The National Policy on Urban Street Vendors, 2009, was a revision of the previous policy, and it recognised the rights and obligations of street vendors in greater detail. According to Property Rights of Street Vendors, a paper by the Centre for Civil Society, the 2009 Policy “provided for serving notice, thereafter imposition of fine and resorting to eviction only upon failure of the earlier two measures. It also provided that wherever goods are confiscated (only as a measure of last resort) they should be returned within a reasonable period of time and upon payment of a prescribed fee.” The Policy also called for the setting up of a Town Vending Committee by local bodies in cities and towns. Its role would be to see that, after a survey, existing hawkers numbering up to 2.5% of the population of a given zone — a ward, town, city — are accommodated in vending areas, and if the number of vendors exceeds this, find appropriate space in adjoining areas.
The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act was passed in 2014. It is aimed at regularising hawkers and protecting their livelihoods and implemented locally by Town Vending Committees, with the specification that, to preserve natural markets, hawkers and vendors should be regularised and not randomly relocated. The Act provides for the payment of a vending fee, and the right to a certificate that can be used by the next of kin of a vendor who has passed on.
