MumbaiNaama: ‘Hawkers Versus Citizens’ Is A False Binary And Failure Of City Planning

That the issue of hawkers or street vendors occupying public spaces, including pavements and entry-exit points of railway stations among others, has continued to linger for years together without a proper and fair resolution points to an inescapable inference: the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and the Maharashtra government have no political will or nurse vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Pedestrians, including school-going children and senior citizens, have had to pay the price for this recalcitrance on a daily basis, often risking their lives as they are forced to walk on the streets that are clogged with vehicles. The waiting spaces at bus stops are no longer available to commuters; the entry-exit points at suburban railway stations are so congested with vendors and their wares that a stampede could happen any moment during rush hours. The issue has been allowed to become the “mammoth problem” that it now is, to use the description that the Bombay High Court made last week.

What really is the problem? In simple terms, there are many more hawkers than there is space for them across the city, there are vendors without licences and they keep returning to ‘their’ spots despite the BMC’s action, and that all this has left virtually no space for pedestrians and others for safe and easy movement. Over the past decades, the BMC and the state government have framed this issue as a binary between two sets of citizens — hawkers and pedestrians. The High Court too, perhaps unwittingly, added to this when it stated that “no one must suffer, be it citizens, authorised or unauthorised hawkers”.

Pedestrians and hawkers are all citizens; the problem is not citizens versus hawkers but the failure of the authorities to accommodate both in a fair manner. In framing such a binary, the authorities have cleverly, almost mischievously, pitted one group of people against another when the reality is that both groups are suffering due to the policies, politics and actions of these authorities.

There was hardly a time in the recent history of Mumbai when its streets and pavements were free of hawkers and vendors but this has been allowed to turn into a “menace” due to the lack of a realistic and sound policy, and its implementation. How, you may ask. Mumbai has had at least two Development Plans drawn up and implemented during the past four decades in which public spaces have been overrun by vendors, both authorised and unauthorised. However, these plans — either by design or default — made no land use allocation for any kind of informality in the city even when it was starkly evident that informal work such as hawking and vending was a large part of the city’s economy.

The plans pretended as if hawkers and vendors did not dot the city’s landscape or used any part of the public space. Or assumed, wrongly despite the available information, that all street vending would be accommodated in the markets that the BMC had constructed across the city’s 24 wards for this work. The location of these markets, their design, and allocation of space have all left much to desire. It was a known fact that the number of hawkers and vendors were far in excess of the number that could be accommodated in these markets.

Given this, for the city’s Development Plans to not acknowledge this informal work and its need for public space, and to not allot such spaces across neighbourhoods has meant that hawkers and vendors are widely seen as a “menace” despite their symbiotic relationship with the city’s economy, their role as “eyes on the street” which helps the circulation and safety on the streets, and their right to the city too. The BMC has no clear idea of how many hawkers and vendors there might be across Mumbai; its licences are far fewer in number than the reality. But the plans did not even budget land for the licensed ones.

The coterie and extra-ordinary clout of hawkers has not helped either. They have often clashed with the police and the BMC’s encroachment removal teams which have intermittently gone after the unlicensed vendors, preferring to turn a blind eye at other times presumably in return for some chai-pani. Eight hawkers’ unions have represented Mumbai’s hawkers in the ongoing petition. The hawkers’ right to the city must be enforced and protected, their role must be recognised. But they cannot be allowed to run riot which is what the BMC has selectively allowed.

Therefore, the High Court’s observations in the ongoing petition are on point. The “entire state machinery has collapsed,” pointed out the division bench of Justice MS Sonak and Kamal Khata last week, “Is this what you (authorities) want to say? If you can’t do it, give it up. Shut down, shut down the courts too so you won’t have directions.” Then the bench stated that “citizens cannot be expected to sit in court daily to enforce their rights”. Here, citizens presumably meant pedestrians who have a right to safe walking spaces.

In June, the bench had made a pertinent observation that when the Prime Minister or VVIPs come, streets are immediately cleared and stay so till they are around. “How is it done then? Why can’t it be done otherwise for everyone else,” the bench questioned the BMC and state government, further asking what they would do if Mantralaya and the Governor’s bungalow were to be similarly blocked by hawkers. Finally, this week, the BMC worked out 20 spots to be cleared as a “test case”. We can only wait and watch.

That it should take directions from the Bombay High Court to address a governance issue should shame the BMC and the government. They feel no remorse, going by their request for time to file affidavits. That they have resolutely refused to allocate sufficient space for hawkers and street vendors in the city’s plans is testament to either their deliberate short-sightedness on the issue or devious strategies to keep the pot boiling. Either way, all Mumbaikars suffer.

Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’