THIS essay discusses a particular mode of engagement of street hawkers/street vendors with the governmental state and the larger public in contemporary Indian cities. I call this engagement ‘counter-pedestrianism’. I show how counter-pedestrianism might offer a critique of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 (GoI 2014) which is widely believed to have established the ‘rights’ of the street hawkers to the footpath/pavement/sidewalk. I hope to describe via this the rudiments of a formative association taking shape between the hawker and the realm of democratic politics in India that might actually lend certain directionality to the way in which large masses of working populations might have to stake their claims of livelihood and entitlements in the future. The point then is to both describe as well as yield an analytic of ‘politics’ if by that term we understand the ways in which groups of people participate in the manner and matter of their own ruling.

Street hawkers often face eviction as they are deemed as potential obstacles to pedestrian flow. The footpath/pavement/sidewalk in ‘modern cities’ (including colonial cities like Calcutta, where the first footpath was constructed in 1856-57 along Chowringhee) is engineered as a well marked out zone for the pedestrian, whose right of passage has been a stable modern legal axiom. Often the pedestrian becomes the symbol of the urban everyman being increasingly run-off the footpath by automobile traffic and by different forms of ‘encroachment’ on pedestrian spaces. Moreover, the footpath is supposed to be withdrawn from private appropriations. Any kind of formal-legal recognition of stationary hawkers on the footpaths will have to then deal with both the pedestrian’s inviolable right of passage, as well as the distribution of property in public and private domains.

Unlike the abstract pedestrian’s rights, which are fundamental to the law of public space in a city, the street vendor’s ‘rights’ have usually been founded on a series of exceptions and contingent legality. It thus becomes imperative to understand the nature of the right that the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 (henceforth SVA) promises to hawkers before it backfires on them.¹

The SVA acts out a mechanism to protect the livelihood of a population group (the hawkers) by regulating their livelihood practices (Regulation of street vending). At the heart of the SVA lies a concern that unregulated growth of sedentary hawkers in our cities will eventually displace the pedestrians from the footpath. Hence, the act of vending has to be regulated on the footpath to retain the pedestrian’s right of passage.

 

It is generally believed that street vending can be regulated by partitioning the entire city into vending and non-vending zones. Only a regulated number of street vendors will be able to vend in vending zones. These zones will be governed by a participative body called the Town Vending Committee (TVC); 40 per cent of its membership will be constituted of associations of street vendors. Zoning, we know, is a disciplinary technique of power that aims to quarantine a target group through an active process of registration of its members. The SVA does the same. Its main motive is to identify each single hawker at a proper place. The SVA appears to be sympathetic to peripatetic hawkers – if they are registered in the municipal notebook. It is concerned more with the sedentary/stationary hawkers – ‘objects’ that can potentially obstruct pedestrian flow.

It could be contended that to invite the participation of hawkers in their own ‘zoning’ within the city space is a remarkable measure of the SVA. It supersedes a number of municipal by-laws that gave the municipal commissioner the authority to evict and zone out hawkers. However, the SVA remains aggressively anxious to separate the pedestrian from the hawker to ensure the best possible circulation of bodies and things. In this respect, I argue, the SVA is consistent with a number of municipal acts over which it prevails.

 

Thus, Section 313 (1) of the Bombay Municipal Act, 1888 says: No person shall, except with the written permission of the Commissioner – (a) place or deposit upon any street or upon any open channel, drain or well in any street [or in any public place] any stall, chair, bench, box, ladder, bale or other thing so as to form an obstruction thereto or encroachment thereon; (b) project, at a height of less than twelve feet from the surface of the street, any board, or shelf, beyond the line of the plinth of any building, over any street or over any open channel drain, well or tank in any street; (c) attach to, or suspend from, any wall or portion of a building abutting on a street, at a less height than aforesaid, anything whatever.²

Further, Section 314-C of the same act gives the Municipal Commissioner the ‘power to remove without notice any article whatsoever hawked or exposed for sale in any public place or in any public street in contravention of the provisions of Section 313-A and any vehicle, package, box, board, shelf or any other thing in or on which such article is placed or kept for the purpose of sale.’³

The SVA wishes to protect hawkers so long as they do not obstruct pedestrian flow. It holds that in order to keep the hawkers, the city must, in the first place, de-sedentarize the potentially sedentarizing vending practices. This can be accomplished by ensuring that the material structure of the stalls is uniformly made of collapsible elements such as folding tables and chairs made of metal and plastic rather than the traditional wooden chowkies (low wooden seats) to display merchandise, push carts and umbrellas rather than bamboo structure and corrugated roofing, removable plastic clothing racks, shelves and cardboard boxes of various size.

 

The SVA then suggests that to avoid eviction, the street vendors have to be organized in vending zones. The Indian Road Congress (IRC) has already offered such a model. The IRC (2012) proposes to divide the ‘flexible pavement’ into three zones: (a) the ‘frontage zone’ along the property line (IRC: 103-2012, 6.1.5.3), (b) the ‘furniture zone’ at the kerbside (IRC: 103-2012, 6.1.10.2, 6.11.4), (c) the ‘pedestrian zone’ in the middle that should be free of obstructions (IRC: 103-2012, 6.1.10.2). It is argued that the hawkers can be moved to the furniture zone that hosts the manholes, benches, utility boxes, and other potential obstructions outside the pedestrian zone.

It is then possible to argue that the governmental rationality operates through a clear distinction between static objects (like a booth, ‘structure or fixture’, vehicle, or ‘article whatsoever hawked and exposed’) on the one hand, and bodies and the nodes of circulation (like the street, the pedestrian zone, and drain) on the other ‘in such a way that the inherent dangers of circulation are cancelled out.’⁴ All the static objects are viewed with equal suspicion of obstructing the free circulation of pedestrians and of air and water. In this sense, the street hawker is nothing more than an urban object legitimate only in so far as she does not obstruct the pedestrian flow. The SVA is hardly an exception to the rule.

To summarize, this essay argues that governmental, planning and legislative initiatives to protect hawkers are essentially founded on the principle that the pedestrian and the hawker are oppositional categories. Such initiatives might run counter to such protective intentions. Only a radical critique of the pedestrian-centric understanding of the footpath in law and policy can safeguard street vendors from eviction. The remaining part of the essay narrates one such experiment in Kolkata.

 

The proto-legal entity of the pedestrian (and her/his ‘rights’) could very well be a necessary medium for the operation of the powerful yet little recognized governing principle that ensures pedestrian circulation through appropriate disciplining of bodies and things on the street that Nicholas Blomley⁵ has termed ‘pedestrianism’ – an ‘obvious and uncontested goal for urban governments.’ Pedestrianism focuses on concerns such as flow, placement, and circulation of bodies and things and as Blomley explains, ‘pedestrianism can treat the human subject as essentially "an object", either in motion or at rest (emphasis mine).’⁶

How, then, is it possible to counter pedestrianism, which ‘structures the ways in which state agents think about and act upon the spaces of the city?’ (p. 106) Blomley is convinced that opposition cannot come from the humanist, rights-based perspective long upheld by activists and academicians who treat the ‘public space as a space, first and foremost, of [the] people.’ (p. 8) He thus considers the ‘civic humanist’ perspective of human rights as always already superseded by the apparently banal ‘post-humanist’ perspective of pedestrianism. The alternative, for him, should then emerge from ‘within pedestrianism’. (p. 111, italics in the original) Blomley leaves us here.

 

While the SVA marks the founding instance of both legal recognition as well as strategic manoeuvring of the hawkers by the government, it has perhaps managed to erect itself only on certain grounds of legitimacy that have functioned in lieu of legal measures to enable the hawkers to practice their trade. These grounds of legitimacy were crafted prior to explicit legal sanction through engaged public action. One such initiative was that of the Hawker Sangram Committee (HSC). Founded in 1996 in the crucible of the protest against a large-scale eviction drive in Kolkata named ‘Operation Sunshine’, the HSC is the precursor to the National Hawker Federation (NHF) and the most influential federation of hawkers’ unions in Kolkata. I would like to propose, albeit tentatively, that the HSC has sought to devise a world of what might be referred to as ‘counter-pedestrianism’.

In March 2009, the HSC leadership decided to ‘sensitize’ hawkers to the committee’s basic code of conduct, which it expected hawkers to respect while ‘serving’ on the street. The HSC formed a team that visited hawkers’ stalls, and interacted with hawkers and pedestrians to counter the sustained media campaign against hawkers. The idea was to reaffirm the intimacy of the hawkers’ connection with the rest of society and establish that hawking was not the primary cause of congestion, accidents, or pedestrian immobility.

As a member of that team, I was asked, in particular, to demonstrate that the notion of a conflict of interest between pedestrians and hawkers was premised on factually wrong assumptions. The investigating team, which comprised hawkers and activists, visited as many as thirty busy street intersections of the city, observing transactions and talking to all willing participants. The team interacted with shop owners, traffic police, shopping mall employees, transport sector workers, office goers, pavement dwellers, hospital visitors, and daily commuters (in a particular rail station).

Our observation and survey continued for two months. We asked hawkers about pedestrians and vice versa, but we spent more time observing how pedestrians and hawkers engaged with each other. We also observed how human relations on the street were framed and mediated by the street apparatus – benches, traffic barriers, bollards, streetlamps, traffic lights and signs, bus and tram stops, taxi and auto rickshaw stands, public lavatories, municipal water taps, tree protectors, memorials, public sculptures, waste receptacles, and so on. We observed how the street actors developed their own theories of association.

 

Generally, hawkers set up their stalls either in front of buildings, and use the walls facing the footpath, and opposite buildings and other shops at the curbside edge of the footpath, forming a corridor in the middle for pedestrian traffic. The ideal site for a food stall, according to food hawkers, is the mid-point between the municipal water tap and the drain at the curbside of the footpath. The chances of transaction improve with proximity to busy transit points and the hawkers’ access to certain utilities (such as a municipal water tap) by the footpath. Lucrative stall spaces are also traded and rented out (something that the SVA thoroughly ‘illegalizes’).

In the garment sector, shopkeepers often comply with hawkers to extend their shop interiors to the footpath – hawkers sell the shopkeepers’ merchandise at a lower price to access a different consumer base and, in return, use the electricity connections at the shops and store their wares there when the market is closed. But, the established food sellers, vegetable vendors and fruit sellers usually view hawkers near marketplaces, where they normally cluster, as potential encroachers upon their consumer base; the authorities too feel that they usurp ratepayers’ privileges. This antagonism often leads to small-scale eviction of hawkers. In Kolkata’s New Market area one finds instances of this antagonism between the shop owners and hawkers.

 

The ‘evidence’ we collected enabled the HSC, in certain ways, to frame its official position regarding pedestrianism. Subsequently, the HSC organized a road show of photographs that demonstrated how hawkers and pedestrians inhabit a kind of shared network in which categories continuously overreach their assigned labels. The pedestrian broke down into other figures (stranger, regular visitor, office worker, etc.); the hawker became a pedestrian and customer; the tree protector and lamp post turned out to be ideal supports for a tarpaulin sheet. Many of our pedestrian respondents pointed out that in congested hawking areas, such as in Shyambazar and Gariahat (in Kolkata), the long continuum of tarpaulin roofs protected them from sunburn and rain. Some mentioned how in the late evenings the city was illuminated thanks to the abundance of electricity hook-ups at hawkers’ stalls.

The more one follows these arrangements in particular situations, the more one understands how the destiny of an object acquires infinite dimensions but only in association with other objects. In the course of a number of street demonstrations, the HSC pointed out how the demolition of one stall in a particular area could lead to the destruction of a network of small economies that sustained the ‘poor’, the ‘daily commuter’ and the ‘lower middle class’. Further, the demonstrations showed how the pedestrian’s right of passage at a busy street intersection was hampered usually by factors other than hawkers. These included illegal extensions of shops, potholes, intermittent enclosures related to work being done on roads, drainage systems, and telephone and power lines (requiring enclosure and diversion of traffic for indefinite periods); parking spaces, both legal and illegal; and illegal shrines on streets and footpaths.

 

In their explanation to the public of the many causes of pedestrians’ flight from footpaths, the HSC demonstrations actually admitted to hawkers’ stalls being potential impediments to pedestrian mobility, but only as one of numerous such impediments. The demonstrations asserted that despite their ‘encroachment’, hawkers merited a grant of immunity, as they provided the poorer social classes with ‘services’ at a remarkably low cost, and thus contributed to the country’s economy. As one of the HSC leaders said, ‘We keep the city affordable and accessible to the poor. We are here as poor pedestrians require us to be here. We are also here to create the pedestrian.’ At this precise moment, the HSC perhaps invented an entire cosmos where the hawker’s claim to space became a claim to enter society’s structures of obligation.

The HSC leader’s comment encapsulated also of course the political economy of street vending in cities like Kolkata. The comment also confirms many of the research findings of scholars such as Sharit Bhowmik).⁷ The leader reminded the rest of the city that hawkers survive but also contribute to the circulation (the hallmark of pedestrianism) of commodities, money, and bodies. While the apparent conflict of interest between the ‘mobile’ pedestrian and the ‘immobile’ hawker could continue to frame conceptions and decisions concerning urban street life even after the coming into action of the SVA, the HSC’s campaign could throw light, by virtue of both its form and content, upon the much deeper structural connections among diverse elements of the street that implicate each other in mutual creation, and often exceed their intended utility. Thus, like pedestrianism, counter-pedestrianism attaches much significance to the relationality among bodies, spaces and things.

To summarize, we have seen that counter-pedestrianism blurs the distinction between the pedestrian and the hawker. It appears to me that this blurring does not have similar impacts on the pedestrian and the hawker. The pedestrian in counter-pedestrianism is an empirical figure who can be a stranger, a stroller, a buyer, a loiterer and a window shopper. The hawker, on the other hand, becomes an abstract entity while retaining her empirical associations.

 

On 5 July 2015, I attended a national workshop at Hyderabad organized by an influential organization of hawkers. The workshop was to come up with a set of rules, schemes and by-laws in accordance with the SVA. Another agenda of the workshop was to plan a massive national conference in February 2016 in New Delhi. In the middle of the discussion, three officials from a nationalized bank accompanied by a senior representative of an advertisement agency appeared on the stage. The representative of the advertisement agency started his speech by calling the hawkers ‘human capital’, and hitherto unrealized resource in our urban centres. We learned that they came to interact with the members of the hawkers’ organization to convince them about the magic potential of the Atal Pension Yojana which was one of the flagship projects of the Modi government. The representative of the advertisement agency mentioned that they wanted to use the hawkers to reach the poor. The hawker will ‘hawk’ financial inclusion. In exchange of its service to a great ‘national cause’, the hawkers’ organization ensured the advertisement agency’s assistance to brand its Delhi conference.

 

In the same workshop, we heard that at several places in Delhi, the newly manufactured hawkers’ stalls had become sites to hang advertisements of branded goods, and of the activities of the government. This is how, in the post-SVA era, the hawker is capitalized. In the post-SVA era, the hawkers emerge as productive subjects capable of serving the society as individual investors, and as micro-entrepreneurs. This ‘entrepreneurial self’ of the hawker is constructed as the ‘other’ of the unemployed, undocumented, disposable subjects on the one hand and the wage earning labourers on the other.

The more the hawker becomes a formal-legal subject, the more exclusive an entity it becomes. The practice of ‘counter-pedestrianism’ over the years when legal sanction was not available, had successfully coded the footpath as a site of negotiation between the hawker and the pedestrian, but only perhaps at the cost of several other possibilities entailed by, for instance, the inclusion of pavement dwellers (those who live and sleep on the footpath) in this negotiation. Thus, counter-pedestrianism was not devoid of ‘social engineering’. Nor was it immune from pedestrianist appropriation. Indeed, the authors of counter-pedestrianism have now, with the SVA, come to accept a legal self-definition that does not acknowledge any wage relation between the employer and the employee. The SVA keeps the option for the family members of the registered hawkers to take part in vending activities; it clearly ignores and potentially illegalizes the vast army of wage earners in this sector. Predictably, the SVA is not in conversation with either the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 or the Shops and Establishments Act, 1953.

 

Once upon a time, the HSC used to bolster the collective transgression of the rule of property. Now, it has become a stakeholder in the legislative process. The success of the HSC and the NHF will depend in future on how it addresses issues of wage relations (as very often the hawkers recruit labour), profitability, accumulation and scale as street hawking is increasingly becoming subject to an anonymous market process. I am convinced that an exclusive focus on livelihood is no longer enough to follow the forms of association that the hawkers are now forced to establish.

 

Footnotes:

1. It should be noted that the purpose of this critique is not to denounce the enormous activist and academic efforts that have gone into the making of this piece of progressive legislation. It should be acknowledged that the SVA is the first concerted attempt on part of the Indian state to address street vending not as an aberration, but as a chapter of urban planning. I have shown elsewhere (Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, ‘Institutionalizing Informality: The Hawkers’ Question in Post-Colonial Calcutta’, Modern Asian Studies, available on CJO2015. doi:10.1017/S0026749 X1400064X), how the governmentalization of street vending has led to a kind of judicialization of the hawkers’ mobilization. The SVA has opened channels for the hawkers to take their issues to the court as well as to the elite circuit of the government. My disquiet with the SVA fanatics resides in my general skepticism about what I call ‘legislative social change’. I am thankful to S.K. Bhowmik and Saktiman Ghosh for encouraging me to work on the SVA even though their readings of the same are radically different from the one presented in this essay.

2. Seminar 491, July 2000, Street Vendors: a symposium on reconciling people’s livelihood and urban governance. http://www.india-seminar.com/2000/491/491%20factfile.htm

3. Ibid.

4. Michel Foucault, (trans. Graham Burchell). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

5. Nicholas Blomley, Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. Routledge, New York, 2011, p. 8.

6. Ibid., p. 9.

7. Sharit. K. Bhowmik, ‘Social Security for Street Vendors’, Seminar 568, December 2006 (Securing the Insecure: a symposium on extending social security to unprotected workers). http://www.india-seminar.com/2006/568/568_sharit_k_bhowmik.htm

 

References:

Government of India (GOI), Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, 2014 http://www.indiacode.nic.in/acts2014/7%20of%202014.pdf.

Indian Road Congress (IRC), Guidelines for Pedestrian Facilities-IRC: 103-2012, New Delhi, 2012.