Street Vendors Act: Emerging  Challenges 

Syllabus: GS2/Governance/GS 3/Economy

In News

• 10 Years of Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act has been completed .

About the Act 

• The Act came into effect on May 1, 2014, marking a significant milestone after nearly four decades of legal jurisprudence and the tireless efforts of street vendor movements across India.
• It aimed to ‘protect’ and ‘regulate’ street vending in cities, with State-level rules and schemes, and execution by Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) through by-laws, planning, and regulation. 

Feature 

• The Act clearly delineates the roles and responsibilities of both vendors and various levels of government. 
• It recognises the positive urban role of vendors and the need for livelihood protection. 
• It commits to accommodating all ‘existing’ vendors in vending zones and issuing vending certificates. 
• The Act establishes a participatory governance structure through Town Vending Committees (TVCs) and mandates that street vendor representatives must constitute 40% of TVC members, with a sub-representation of 33% of women street vendors. 
• These committees are tasked with ensuring the inclusion of all existing vendors in vending zones. 
• The Act outlines mechanisms for addressing grievances and disputes, proposing the establishment of a Grievance Redressal Committee chaired by a civil judge or judicial magistrate. 
• Its provisions set a crucial precedent for inclusive and participatory approaches to address street vending needs in cities, at least in theory.

Need of the law 

• Street vendors, estimated to constitute 2.5% of any city’s population, play multifaceted roles in city life. 
• Local vegetable sellers and food vendors are essential providers of daily services. Vending offers many migrants and the urban poor a source of modest yet consistent income. 
• The vendors also make city life affordable for others by providing vital links in the food, nutrition, and goods distribution chain at reasonable prices.
• Street vendors are also integral to Indian culture — imagine Mumbai without its vada pav or Chennai without its roadside dosai. The law was enacted to acknowledge this reality. 

Broad Challenges

• The Act has faced three broad challenges.
  • At the administrative level, there has been a noticeable increase in harassment and evictions of street vendors, despite the Act’s emphasis on their protection and regulation. 
  • This is often due to an outdated bureaucratic mindset that views vendors as illegal entities to be cleared. 
  • There is also a pervasive lack of awareness and sensitisation about the Act among state authorities, the wider public, and vendors themselves.
  • TVCs often remain under the control of local city authorities, with limited influence from street vendor representatives. And the representation of women vendors in TVCs is mostly tokenistic.
• At the governance level, existing urban governance mechanisms are often weak.
  • The Act does not integrate well with the framework established by the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act for urban governance. 
  • ULBs lack sufficient powers and capacities. 
  • Schemes like the Smart Cities Mission, laden with resources and pushed through as policy priorities from the top-down, mostly focus on infrastructure development and ignore the provisions of the Act for the inclusion of street vendors in city planning.
• At the societal level, the prevailing image of the ‘world class city tends to be exclusionary.
  • It marginalises and stigmatises street vendors as obstacles to urban development instead of acknowledging them as legitimate contributors to the urban economy. 
  • These challenges are reflected in city designs, urban policies, and public perceptions of neighbourhoods.
• The Act now faces new challenges such as the impact of climate change on vendors, a surge in the number of vendors, competition from e-commerce, and reduced incomes. 

Way Forward

• While the Act is progressive and detailed, its implementation requires support, possibly (and ironically) necessitating top-down direction and management starting from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. 
• This needs to be decentralised over time to ensure effectiveness in addressing the diverse needs and contexts of street vendors nationwide.
  • PM SVANidhi, a micro-credit facility for street vendors, has been a positive example in that direction. 
• There is a strong need to decentralise interventions, enhance the capacities of ULBs to plan for street vending in cities, and move away from high-handed department-led actions to actual deliberative processes at the TVC level. 
• Urban schemes, city planning guidelines, and policies need to be amended to include street vending.

• The Act’s broad welfare provisions must be used creatively to meet the emerging needs of street vendors. 
• The sub-component on street vendors in the National Urban Livelihood Mission needs to take cognisance of the changed realities and facilitate innovative measures for addressing needs.