What’s Mumbai without its hawkers?

MUMBAI, April 8

OVER the past four to five months the J.N. Tata Road leading from Churchgate and lanes leading off the main road have been brutally swept clean of hawkers. 

The wada-pav wala, the chai wala and the sandwich wala have been denied their daily lives by the Mumbai municipal administration. The area is as clean, empty and quiet as the pockets of the hawkers. 

“Given a choice, the hawkers will squat in the middle of roads. But they won’t, as it will only reduce business. Whether anyone likes it or not we are a bit practical. We have been taking our problems to the courts on that premise,” says the 50-year-old general secretary of Bombay Hawkers Association, K. Pocker. 

The Mumbai municipal administration is not prepared to accommodate the extant hawker population while the trading folk hope the Supreme Court and a Government Task Force on Street Vendors will help them. The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case in April and efforts are on to get the Task Force script its report to facilitate the hearings.

In the cubicle behind Suvidha Hotel on D.N. Road, which can hardly accommodate three at a time, the 7th-class-pass Pocker elaborates on the petitions filed in the Bombay High Court. Coming from Kannur in Kerala, Pocker has spent some 35 years in Mumbai, owns a stall and is today cut up over the rather rough ways the administration adopts against the hawker community. 

According to an order of K.V. Acharekar, Assistant Municipal Commissioner (A Ward), action against hawkers on J.N. Tata Road and Jevan Bhima Road followed the orders of the Mumbai High Court, dated May 3, 2001. “Due to shortage of police force and BMC security, private security agency Geekay Security Agency was deployed in this area to prevent the hawkers from returning and occupying the footpaths illegally, which would amount to an offence under Section 516(AAA) of the BMC Act, 1888,” says the order. The security agency has been granted police powers and the security guards will be treated as “public servants” within the meaning of Section 21 of the Indian Penal Code. 

For Gautam Chatterjee, Additional Municipal Commissioner, Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation, the issue is quite clear. In a chat with Business Line, Chatterjee said the corporation was going by the number count of 1997 made by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and Yuva, an NGO, which placed the hawker population at one lakh. “Our Vigilance Department made a physical verification on a sample basis, and estimated the number of hawkers to be around 70-75 thousand as there was duplication,” Chatterjee explains.

The Bombay High Court has set apart only 131 hawking zone roads. The zone roads can accommodate only around 17,000 hawkers, says Chatterjee, adding, “The municipal administration in its affidavit given to the Supreme Court has stated that the stress should be on implementing non-hawking zones in phases (46 roads to start with) and simultaneously making adequate space available for accommodating the number of hawkers held eligible as per TISS-Yuva.”

Apparently, Mumbai can fit in at best one lakh hawkers or the revised list of 75,000 while the hawker population is estimated by Pocker and experts at around three lakh.

Prof S. Bhowmik, professor and Head, Department of Sociology, Mumbai University, contends that about 2 per cent of the urban population in each city comprises vendors. The middle-aged professor should know, having made a study of the problems of hawkers in various cities and being on the Task Force on Street Vendors. 

What gets the professor’s goat is the administrative action in the city despite the Supreme Court looking into the subject and a letter from the Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development and Poverty Aleviation (UDPA), requesting all State Governments to halt all evictions against hawkers “till such time the policy on street vendors/hawkers is finalised”. 

But going by Gautam Chatterjee a Ministry note cannot be placed above a Bombay High Court order. Also, the Supreme Court has not issued any stay on the matter of eviction.

Yet, the minutes of the second meeting of the Task Force do provide some perspective. The secretary, UDPA, emphasised: “Hawking is an economic activity and vendors are an integral part of the economy; they contribute to the service sector and have become an indispensable part of the urban society. The problems faced by vendors could be attributed to the flaws on the part of city planners and the ever-growing rural-urban migration.”

The meeting talks of the “need to earmark one-third of the footpath space for hawking activities as was done in some other countries; and, to do away with the concept of building hawking plazas since it defeats the very purpose of hawking.”

Today, cement pots with half-dying plants dot the footpath along J.N. Tata Road in place of the lost community of hawkers.