Evicted, neglected, omitted: The story of street vendors

Unable to work as a housemaid because of her disability, Triveni* thought that selling pani puri would put food on the table. She set up a mobile cart on a footpath in a mid-income locality in Bengaluru near a few colleges. Her shop is open until 9.30 pm, and is a hit among youngsters looking for low-cost tasty food.

However, she doesn’t have a certificate from Bengaluru’s municipality and is forced to pay a ‘cut’ of Rs 30 each to a handful of people every day, to avoid eviction. “I don’t know who to approach to register as a street vendor or to get a disability certificate,” she says.

The inability to attach some legitimacy to their livelihood is a reality that haunts lakhs of street vendors across the country.

The legislation to ensure the identification and documentation of street vendors, the Street Vendors Act, 2014, (SV Act) mandates that Urban Local Bodies (ULB) survey vendors and issue identity cards. It also put the number of street vendors at 2.5% of the urban population, which comes to 3.12 crore (as per the 2011 census).

Without accurate, official figures from ULBs, numbers vary wildly. “Nobody can give you the exact numbers as of now,” says Wajiha Aziz Rizvi, programme coordinator, National Association of Street Vendors in India (NASVI). She gives the example of the Delhi government identifying just 73,457 street vendors until now, while in reality, there are more than 2 lakh of them in Delhi.

In Bengaluru, the last survey was conducted in 2017 as per directions from the High Court of Karnataka. Subsequently, the municipality started issuing identity cards. These cards have to be renewed after five years.

A lack of clarity on the number of street vendors, failure to carry out surveys and registration reflects the neglect of their role in the Indian economy.

With a turnover ranging between Rs 500 and Rs 10,000 per day, street vendors are the quiet lifeblood of daily trade. “Vendors cater to 80% of the population and channelise the sales of small-scale industries,” says Shaktiman Ghosh, General Secretary of the National Hawker Federation (NHF) which represents 1,200 street vendor unions across 28 states.

Ghosh estimates the number of hawkers at 4 crores, and the average street vending turnover at Rs 2,000 per vendor per day.

Ghosh estimates an economic turnover of Rs 8,000 crores per day.

In Mumbai, it is common to see street vendors running helter-skelter shouting “gaadi aayi….gaadi aayi” when the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s anti-encroachment vehicles are at work. Street vendors face threats of eviction every other day.

Those opposite showrooms have to also pay a ‘rent’. “It costs us rent to set up shop outside big stores. We also have to pay ‘hafta’ to police and corporation staff. In Mumbai, it is difficult to survive now,” says Satish*, a native of Uttar Pradesh, who runs a garment stall near Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in Mumbai.

Shailaja, a shop vendor in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, has been forced to change the location of her shop over the years. Initially running a shop on M G Road, a road-widening project and a new textile showroom resulted in evictions. "We are always under the threat of being displaced, even if the government says that we will be protected," she says.

The street vending zones allocated by some municipalities are also in no way sufficient. The 74 street vending zones identified by the Kochi corporation could accommodate only 1,500 vendors. Kochi has identified over 3,520 vendors.

"Hawkers want the implementation of the law, permanent settlement, hawking zones, social security, and central monitoring. We want harassment and eviction to stop," says Shaktiman Ghosh.

The plastic ban that came into effect on July 1 has dealt another blow. "The ban is good, we welcome it. But we need the government to subsidise cloth bags or alternatives,” says S Babu, president of Bengaluru District Street Vendors Association.

Living with loans

Already living on the edge after demonetisation, arbitrary restrictions and a lack of business during the Covid-19 pandemic only rattled vendors’ lives further.

“Before Covid, GST and demonetisation affected us. During Covid, our shops were closed for months, and all our capital was lost,” says Gokul Das, a vendor from Serampore, in West Bengal’s Hooghly district.

Food and clothing vendors were most affected. “Vegetable vendors somehow managed. We (food vendors) had to resort to private loans for exorbitant interests,” says Babu.

Jayachandran, who has been running a wayside eatery in Thiruvananthapuram for the past two decades, says he had to take private loans either by pledging valuables or issue a personal guarantee to run the business after Covid.

Demand has not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. Food vendors suffer in particular because people have become more cautious of hygiene.

The second wave of Covid-19 crashed the spirits and incomes further, putting most vendors in debt.

In this context, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) launched PM Street Vendor's AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM-SVANidhi) scheme to help them, which would also bring them under the formal transactions net.

The programme provides a collateral-free loan which needs an Aadhaar number, certificate of vending or a letter of recommendation from the local municipal body. It intended to cover 2.25% of the urban population in each state.

Some, like Swami Gowda, a street vendor on Bengaluru’s M G Road, are all-praise for the scheme. He repaid his loan of Rs 10,000 in 10 months and became eligible for the second loan.

Now he is repaying the second instalment of Rs 20,000. “It helped me get more items to sell. The scheme is good for people who manage to pay it back in time,” he told DH.

However, a large number of vendors who could not link their mobile numbers with Aadhaar and those without other documentation were left out. Many were simply unaware that such a scheme existed. Those who knew needed help with the online application process.

“We had filled out the form but heard that it was not approved by a local government body,” says Babu Sona Mondal, a vendor from Salt Lake-Sector V in Kolkata. The financial aid of Rs 2,000 given by the West Bengal government didn’t help much.

Some of the vendors who applied successfully couldn't get a loan. R Sellamuthu, a tender coconut vendor from Chennai who was registered in 2017, is one such vendor who didn’t get the loan despite a recommendation by the corporation.

A survey conducted by Indo Global Social Service Society (IGSSS) on 1,642 of the most vulnerable street vendors in central Indian states found that 85% of them had no letters of recommendation. Only 11% of the surveyed vendors availed the PM-SVANidhi loan, while 40% were not aware of the scheme. About 60% of them were never included in ULB surveys.

DH's queries to MoHUA on the lack of data on the accurate number of street vendors and their contribution to the economy are yet to get a response.

The Union government’s call to bring more people under PM-SVANidhi loans is going unheard by many municipalities. “Many municipalities that issue the certificate of vending don’t respect it,” says Arbind Singh, the founder, and coordinator of NASVI, adding that the harassment has stopped. Many street vendors DH spoke to narrated how they become the target of bribery and eviction by cops and municipal officials despite having ID cards.

Those with approved loans still suffer under the weight of debt. “Rs 10,000 I got through the scheme was not enough. We were jobless for months. We survived lockdowns only by borrowing for high interest as no banks entertained us,” says Devara, a cobbler from Mosque Street, north Chennai. He still has an unpaid loan of Rs 30,000 plus interest.

Loopholes in the Act

Though street vendors perform the essential task of providing goods at low costs, their work is informal and goes largely unnoticed. The law has not helped them much.

Prashanth Narang, Senior Fellow, Research, Centre for Civil Society, says the SV Act is poorly drafted. “Implementation is part of the law. If the law is designed in a poor manner, implementation is bound to be poor. The current law is extremely complicated and leads to a lot of friction," he says.

The SV Act mandates the formation of town vending committees (TVC) and vending zones in every city. ULBs have been lax in the implementation.

The situation isn’t rosy where the TVCs have been formed either. “It is a very expensive solution. It requires elections to be conducted, meetings, and agenda. Minutes of the meeting are not circulated, and vendors are not allowed to speak. This is supposed to be a participatory body, but existing TVCs don’t function that way,” says Prashant.

For street vendors, lack of space, evictions, and bribes have become eternal problems and every solution links back to a web of neglect from municipality bodies to the state and the Union governments.

“From a climate change perspective, vendors are a positive force. They consume the least space and water. Unfortunately, they are the first to suffer in any calamity,” says Ghosh.

On the ground, street vendors ask for financial aid and not loans. “We don’t want loans. From being denied allocation of shops in BBMP’s Palika Bazaars to seeking bonds to allotment of loans, we are being made to run from pillar to post each time. We want this to stop, we just want to sell our items in peace,” says Shashikala, a TVC member of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike South Zone.

(With inputs from Mohammed Safi Shamsi in Kolkata, ETB Sivapriyan in Chennai, Arjun Raghunath in Thiruvananthapuram, Mrityunjay Bose in Mumbai and Ajith Athrady in Delhi)

(RTI data from Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, obtained by Venkatesh Nayak, RTI activist)

*Some names have been changed on request