By IPS Correspondents
MADURAI, May 10 2006 (IPS)

For nearly two decades, Tamil Selvi, 45, has been rendering a silent service on the dusty corner of a street in a residential area of this major town in southern Tamil Nadu state.

At the crack of dawn, she sorts and buys vegetables at the central market downtown. On average, she carries 15 kg of goods daily and reaches her rickety makeshift stall by 6 am.

She keeps to this schedule unfailingly, allowing housewives and working women in her community the opportunity to make quick, small and emergency purchases from her stall. She earns 60- 90 Indian rupees (1.3 – 2 US dollars) daily to support her family of two daughters, a son and an aged mother.

But when the road in the area was being paved, the residents’ welfare association found her an obstruction, and asked her to vacate.

However, when Tamil Selvi’s stall disappeared, the same association members wanted her back, because they missed the convenience of having her stall nearby. She returned to her spot after paying 500 rupees (11.13 dollars) to the authorities.

Ashok Kumar, an artisan from Rajasthan state, excels in making terracotta and papier mache statues and other decorative items. But he is too poor to afford a permanent shop. He moves from area to area with his wife and four children, a widowed sister- in-law and her three children.

For his part, Venkatesh from Hyderabad, whose wares are exotic and ethnic, occupies a large part of the pavement, displaying cane sofa sets, garden chairs, dining sets and lampshades.

“I need to choose my location carefully. Or else I am harassed by police or the civic authorities for encroaching. I try to be near a main or wide road so that passers by stop over,” he explains. “Rain or shine, I need to display to attract consumers.”

Lucky days are far and few but he has sold items worth 5,000 rupees (111.4 dollars) in a single day. It also happens that no customer picks up anything for days together.

>From edible and perishable items to household goods, electronic items, clothes, hosiery, leather and plastic items and hundreds of other small and big consumer items – one finds an incredibly fascinating mix of merchandise on big Indian road bazaars. They have no legal sanction, yet they flourish with the consent of the seller and the buyer.

This is the huge unsung family of street vendors, constituting two percent of the metro population. They provide cheaper commodities to the urban poor and a low-cost, decentralised and highly efficient system of distribution. They are a large visible band, but their contributions remain invisible.

Life is definitely not easy for the 10 million-odd street vendors or hawkers in India, many of them in big cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Bangalore.

“They are covered by a multitude of laws, from municipal, traffic and criminal to railway and other acts covering parks and public spaces. They are not recognised as workers and hence have no protection of their rights,” well-known activist Renana Jhabwala of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) says in her essay ‘Roles and Perceptions of Street Vendors’.

“Citizens’ groups fighting for protection of public space argue that street vendors cause congestion and create unhygienic conditions. They are treated as irritants to urban planning and organisation, whereas urban development plan should take street vending as part of its planning process and properly regulate hawking,” points out Sharit Bhowmik of the University of Mumbai, a key person in the National Task Force on Street Vending and the man behind the formation of the National Alliance of Street Vending in India.

He believes street vending can be an asset to the urban system if hawkers are given a fair opportunity to contribute to development. “But being marginalised urban poor, they are seen as troublemakers. They experience frequent harassment – their goods are confiscated, carts demolished, and they are victims of extortion and bribery,” rues Bhowmik.

K. Thilagam, a member of a voluntary group, trying to regularise street vending, asserts: “The government has failed to provide them jobs. So at least allow them to create a natural market on their own.”

While the Indian government is drafting a national policy that aims to protect vendors’ basic rights, each state has different laws. While the West Bengal government amended a section of the Kolkata Municipal Act to make street vending illegal and punishable, Tamil Nadu – considered one of India’s more progressive states – recognizes street vendors as labourers.

“Even though they have been denied rights, there is at least an attempt to integrate livelihood dependent street food vending in town planning,” observes Thilagam.

Bhowmik strongly recommends legalisation to regularise street vending. “If we are able to induce quality control for the service and include it in urban governance, then these traders can add to the comfort and convenience of all,” he emphasises.

Street vending is essentially a livelihood issue and the Supreme Court has upheld the traders’ right to do business, but properly regulated.

(* Terra Viva is an IPS publication)

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