One of the greatest joys of visiting new places is to wander their streets on foot. As you gaze at myriad built forms — ranging from aged buildings to lamp posts — you uncover the formal city. As you amble in its lanes, you encounter the informal city. Sometimes it’s in the form of a corner store selling warm bread; occasionally it’s in the form of stray kittens sprawled over a discarded tyre; at times it’s children playing gully cricket and men huddled at the nukkad (corner) for a smoke.
But more often than not, especially in a crowded metropolis, what you come across are wandering pedlars and small hawking stands — usually something makeshift, easy to take apart if need be — selling bananas, directing your attention towards a pile of chequered towels, a woman deftly weaving a pile of fragrant mogras into a string, another brewing hot tea and quickly frying a pile of hot bhajiyas for office commuters.
These everyday roadside vendors or hawkers, whose presence or absence gives the city a particular character, have recently drawn a lot of attention in Mumbai, as the city comes to terms with the horrific September 29 stampede at Elphinstone Road (local) railway station, resulting in the death of 22 people. After a railway panel of inquiry concluded that rain and an overcrowded narrow staircase/foot overbridge, which had several hawkers, led to the accident, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena activists beat up street vendors and broke up their stalls. Now, the Bombay High Court has ruled that hawking activity should cease near railway stations and footbridges.
There may be some merit in this, but clearly, we need to look at the hawkers issue more broadly. For quite some time now, many middle-class citizens groups have urged strict action against hawkers, asking residents not to favour their business. The terms routinely used to refer to hawkers and vendors is “menace”, with their everyday businesses described as “encroachments” on public space.This, despite the fact that an existing 2014 central law, the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, protects their presence as a part of the right to livelihood. The law specifies the number of licensed hawkers permitted and outlines the process to implement a fair street vending policy. Mumbai and other cities have failed to implement the law to date, with the Mumbai municipality having frozen hawker licenses since 1978. As a result, only a fraction of Mumbai’s hawkers are licensed. Hawkers desire legal status — their illegality makes them vulnerable to extortion and harassment by a whole range of State and non-State actors.
Unfortunately, by looking upon the hawkers question as only a clearing of pavements issue, we have neglected to see their contribution in several other ways. Firstly, hawkers are not the only ones sullying our pavements. But they are far easier to target as villains than the middle-class who use pavements for car parking and shops/restaurants who unabashedly extend their shopfronts onto footpaths. Secondly, hawking is also an employment issue. It provides the urban poor a means to earn a legitimate livelihood, and in fact, many sell goods produced in small-scale or home-based industries. More interestingly, Why Loiter ’s gender research shows that contrary to common-sense notions of urban beautification, for women, clean lanes and people-less streets do not equal comfort or safety. Many mention that hawkers often represent friendly and familiar ‘eyes’ on the street. Working women remark on the late evening convenience of hawkers near stations and the reassurance provided by the warm light of their petromax lamps.
The suggestion here is not that footpaths should always be crowded with hawkers. The hawker’s issue is eventually about who has rights to the city and its public spaces. We need policy and regulation, but it has to be based on acceptance of the others’ (pedestrians, commuters, hawkers) right to be there too.
Sameera Khan is a Mumbai-based journalist, researcher and co-author, Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets
