CITIZENS in Bangalore have been increasingly participating in activism around civic issues, including questions of road infrastructure, public transport, solid waste management and urban infrastructure, among others. ‘#Steel Flyover Beda’ and ‘#Plunder SURE’¹ are two such recent campaigns in the news for witnessing participation of middle class citizens.

In this article, we look at the reasons for the rise of middle class civic initiatives and their impact on street vendors in Bangalore. This is a debate about competing claims to public spaces, and contestations between the middle class civic action groups and street vendors. We take the example of street vendors as there is growing uneasiness among many middle class residents about pavements being ‘encroached’, observed by the authors in the course of advocacy work undertaken while working closely with the Bengaluru Jilla Beedhi Vyaapari Sanghatanegala Okkuta (Federation of Street Vendor Unions in Bangalore District).

Catalyzed by the recent garbage crisis, ‘citizen’-driven activism in Bangalore is a relatively recent phenomenon.² When residents of Mandur and Mavallipura villages on the periphery of Bangalore, which had garbage dumps situated near them, refused to accept the garbage generated by the city, city residents took up the issue of solid waste management. Along with the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP)³ most Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) became involved in raising awareness about solid waste management (SWM) in their own areas.⁴ These initiatives on waste management, which evolved into successful bans on plastic, and campaigns for improved neighbourhood maintenance, have now expanded into larger claims, as evidenced by the anti-steel flyover and anti-Tender SURE.

 

How is decision-making driven in these civic action groups? Is it inclusive and informed by existing legislations and policies? Since civic activism is playing an increasingly influential role in urban governance, it is important to examine these questions.

Bangalore’s population has exploded in the past few decades, and it is deemed to be the fastest growing urban city in Asia. This is attributable to the city’s wealth, as it is the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) earner among major Indian cities, and has 10,000 individual dollar millionaires and 60,000 super rich people as residents. On the other hand, about 25% to 35% of the one-crore population continues to live in slums,⁵ while informal labour constitutes 68.8% of urban employment in India.⁶ Around 50% of urban informal employment consists of wage labour; own-account (self-employed) earners constitute 40%; and unpaid family work is 10%. However, the contribution of the informal sector to the city’s economy often goes unacknowledged.

 

There are around two lakh street vendors in Bangalore, constituting 2% of the city’s one-crore population. While street vendors remain excluded from decisions on urban governance, civic action groups, which comprise primarily of educated, urbane, propertied middle classes, make several claims about street vending in terms of urban governance.

Some of these claims are that street vendors encroach on public spaces,⁷ that they obstruct pedestrian flow on pavements (especially in areas where there are heavy footfalls, thus forcing pedestrians to walk to roads, causing accidents),⁸ that they are illegal because they do not have licenses to vend in particular areas and do not pay taxes and thus are using public spaces for their ‘profit’, that the number of street vendors is increasing every day and this needs to be curbed, that street vendors do not reside in their vending areas or even in the city (a claim supported by the lack of formal address proof) and yet they invade and pollute spaces occupied by long-term residents of the city, and finally, that the vendors are unclean as they do not use clean water or wash their hands or utensils properly, and that they do not dispose the waste they generate correctly.⁹ On the strength of these claims, civic activism in the city is increasingly characterizing street vendors as illegal encroachers and not rightful citizens of the city with access to public spaces.

 

Resident Welfare Associations often network and communicate using social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Most associations have created social media groups where the urban poor are surveilled. Such groups also include BBMP officials, police, and elected representatives (MLAs and BBMP corporators). If street vendors are ‘encroaching’, pictures are shared on the social media group, with comments passed on their hygiene habits and legality. Similarly, the WhatsApp groups set up by civic activists to spread awareness on various initiatives also have local BBMP officials, corporators, MLAs and police officers as members. There are also official Facebook and Twitter accounts of the Bangalore Traffic Police, BBMP, and individual profiles of bureaucrats and politicians which civic activists use to register their complaints.

BBMP officials, MLAs, corporators and the police all cite ‘pressure’ from these social media groups to justify street vendor evictions. For example, the Bangalore Traffic Police is highly active on social media. When street vendor unions request the police not to harass them, citing the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulating Street Vending) Act, 2014, the police justify their actions saying that they get many Facebook statuses and tweets about the ‘nuisance’ created by vendors. This is despite sections 3(3) and 27 of the act, which prohibits the eviction of street vendors until a survey has been completed, and which also prohibits harassment by police officers, municipal officials and other individuals of the public.

 

The Supreme Court judgment in Maharashtra Ekta Hawkers Union vs. the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Greater Mumbai (Appeal (civil) 4156-4157 of 2002, judgment delivered on 9 September 2013) also states thus in paragraph 4: ‘Unfortunately, the street vendors/hawkers have received raw treatment from the State apparatus before and even after the independence. They are a harassed lot and are constantly victimised by the officials of the local authorities, the police, etc., who regularly target them for extra income and treat them with extreme contempt. The goods and belongings of the street vendors/hawkers are thrown to the ground and destroyed at regular intervals if they are not able to meet the demands of the officials. Perhaps these minions in the administration have not understood the meaning of the term dignity enshrined in the preamble of the Constitution.’

Similar justifications are offered by MLAs and councillors as well. Moreover, elected representatives also say that they are bound to respond to residents because they are their voter base. For example, about 30 women vendors, who are the sole bread earners of their families, were evicted in October 2016 at Mysore Circle. The stated reason for their eviction was that the footpath had been marked for renovation. The councillor, when confronted, said that the pavement was meant for pedestrians to walk and that the vendors were responsible for accidents on the main road. He said, ‘We have to look at the concerns of saarvajanikaru (general public) and not that of street vendors alone’ and promptly showed us pictures of how the ‘public’ had complained on his Facebook page about the garbage dump and the absence of space for walking.

Street vendors are rarely given an opportunity to respond to these complaints, which are seen as representative of the concerns of all citizens. Activists out of misplaced sympathy often suggest that vendors should use dishwashers and sterilizers to keep utensils clean, without acknowledging the fact that street vendors can neither afford such equipment, nor can they use them on the pavement.

 

Even well intentioned plans can adversely affect vending rights, as in the case of a civic action group in Sanjaynagar that came up with a plan to restructure a main road to accommodate street vendors in specific vending zones. They undertook a survey and then allocated zones for street vendors. While their efforts are commendable, the drawback is that they cannot account for the increase in the number of street vendors in these zones, as the number of street vendors naturally increases with the growth in the city’s population.

The Street Vendors Act, 2014 has been drafted to protect livelihoods, and in fact addresses concerns of zoning and orderliness. However, these residents’ groups are impatient and do not want to wait for the street vendors to be put into zones, and at the same time do not want street vendors to be ‘found everywhere’, especially in their localities. Presently, they want street vendors to be evicted and do not want to ‘witness poverty in front of their homes’.¹⁰ Yet, they contend that an increase in the number of street vendors can be curbed by zoning. However, the street vendors, who otherwise congregate around areas which have a large footfall – religious places, hospitals and courts, where people wish to purchase vegetables, fruits and food at reasonable prices – feel that zoning would make them invisible.

 

Currently a vendor may transition from selling vegetables to serving freshly cooked lunch, or move from Chamarajpete to Jayanagar for better earnings. In our experience with the implementation of the Street Vendors Act, we have realized that street vendors’ mobility and access to public space would be severely restricted if they were required to obtain licenses, which would specify the vending area and the items that a vendor is allowed to sell.

Such concern for the hygiene and legality of vendors is rightly countered in Amita Baviskar’s article, ‘The Politics of the City’,¹¹ where she argues that the key concern is with control over space and order to keep away the threat of disease, crime and the displeasure of certain kinds of sights and smells. Baviskar suggests that this is an extension of the concern for bodily well-being and a desire to enhance the ‘quality of life’. Citizens want emptier pavements so they can take their early morning and evening walks in peace – to keep them healthier. This makes certain communities invisible, who provide essential services to the city.

 

Landownership has been described as the arena where notions of legality and illegality are contested, while such claims of citizenship are based on ownership of land.¹² Elected representatives agree to help vendors only if they have voter identification cards in the area. Only if the vendors are part of their vote bank will the politicians help them resolve their issues.

There are public parks maintained by real estate developers such as Mantri Developers and Brigade Developers through a public-private partnership (PPP) mode with the BBMP. There have been several eviction drives against vendors in the vicinity of these parks. Similarly, in the case of Tender SURE, a pet project of Janaagraha, maintaining aesthetics (of the pavement) has led to the invisibilization of street vendors, just as real estate developers have removed street vendors around their PPP parks.

Some RWAs complain that walkers in the park (who are residents of the area) have to suffer the smell and smoke that emanate from ‘cooking non-vegetarian’, and that the non-vegetarian food ‘attracts drunkards and rowdies’ who create a ruckus in the neighbourhood and threaten the safety of women.¹³ There is an obvious casteism at play here, where the upper caste vegetarian residents feel polluted by the odour of non-vegetarian food. Moreover, invoking the safety of women seems facile and misleading, especially since the Justice Verma Committee report (which was constituted after the 16 December 2013 Delhi gang-rape case) stated that the presence of street vendors acts as ‘eyes on the street’ and enhances the safety of women.¹⁴

In his paper, D.A. Ghertner notes that ‘…nuisance has become the legal foundation for a new aesthetic. Spaces that appear polluting or unattractive… are being aggressively criminalised and cleared via nuisance law.’¹⁵ Ghertner’s analysis of the evolution and demolition of slums in terms of aesthetics parallels the example of street vendors; ‘citizens’ view them as they do slums, as a ‘nuisance’.

 

Protecting the rights of street vendors is the duty of the BBMP in the context of Bangalore, but this urban local body (ULB) refuses to take cognisance of the legislation and policies aimed at protecting the rights of street vendors. A senior official at BBMP told us that if street vendors were asked to fill application forms for vending licenses, then there would be no limit to applications and the number of street vendors would multiply. Therefore, on the pretext of regulation, the BBMP relies on the motivation of civic action groups in curbing street vending in the city. Often, it is difficult to get BBMP officials to organize a meeting with street vendors to listen to their difficulties, or to move on implementing the law. While street vendors hardly have access to government officials, the residents have access to them over a message, Facebook status, or tweet.

Explaining how inclusivity in urban governance enhances local democracy, Benjamin and Bhuvaneshwari¹⁶ state that local democracy helps shape political and institutional access that results in pro-poor and inclusive decisions and outcomes. They suggest that pro-poor processes are complicated in nature and tied to economic processes and land settings. Conversations and unilateral decisions on social media does not allow for such pro-poor decisions to be made – an outcome that is encouraged by the BBMP and the police.

 

In fact, conversations about garbage and street vendor clearances happen regularly on social media, which has become the new public space.¹⁷ The state apparatus which participates on social media is also likely to be biased towards the concerns of the latter because state actors consist of the educated, urban, propertied, middle class population, who they perceive as legal citizens of the city, and genuinely concerned about Bangalore’s development. Social media is an echo of class and caste affiliations in the larger society. The state apparatus is thus reluctant to take any steps that would destroy this fraternity.

This dichotomy in approach to the use of public spaces becomes apparent when two-side parking of vehicles is allowed while a street vendor is prevented from using the same space. Use of private vehicles and illegal parking is a major cause of traffic congestion.¹⁸ Pavements are regularly encroached by parked vehicles, shopkeepers displaying their products, darshinis putting out tables and chairs for their customers, and residents laying out gardens. If street vendors are termed illegal, aren’t these encroachments illegal as well?

In a report titled ‘Of Master Plans and Illegalities in an Era of Transition’ by the Alternative Law Forum, the authors state that the gaze of the law has always been on the lower classes and therefore securing a right in the city ipso facto emerges as illegal. However, the authors argue that if this gaze were reversed to include the relative privilege one enjoys in the city, we may discover the intricate network of propertied interests and power. In this scenario, the so-called illegal acts of the urban poor will appear insignificant, yet the consequences they face are far graver.

Therefore, the question of street vending comes down to issues around citizenship, land ownership and right to claim city spaces. Civic activists, who are ‘legal residents’ because they own property in the city, assert the right to determine claims on public space, thus restricting Article 21 (right to life and livelihood) under the Indian Constitution to a specific section of the society, while others have to earn access to these rights.

Consequently, public spaces have come to be exclusively reserved for the propertied section of the population while the disadvantaged are excluded. Just the way ‘black spots’ of garbage are cleared, street vendors too are being cleared from the pavements that furnish their conditions of livelihood.

 

Footnotes:

1. The #Steel Flyover Beda campaign was undertaken by a collective of individuals under the banner of Citizens for Bengaluru to protest against a proposed steel flyover to ease traffic congestion for airport goers, between Basaveshwara Circle and Hebbal. About 812 trees would have been sacrificed for the project which was slated to cost Rs 1,700 crore. The citizens felt that this was an unnecessary expense by the state government. On the other hand, the #Plunder Sure campaign was a coalition of various groups and communities that came together against the Tender SURE roads that are being built across Bangalore in order to beautify pavements in the city. This project is the brainchild of Janaagraha, an organization that has been criticized for being non-transparent. Every kilometre stretch of this pavement, costs the BBMP one crore rupees. This project has come under much criticism as it does not allow for trees to survive on these footpaths. They are also wide, thus decreasing road width and increasing traffic congestion.

2. There are various kinds of civic activism visible in Bangalore. There are beautification drives taken up by organizations such as The Ugly Indian, Jaaga DNA, which were then taken over by IT company people as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives. Other groups have taken up solid waste management and plastic ban, such as the Solid Waste Management Round Table. Groups talking about urban ecology include Hasiru Usiru and Citizens for Sustainability, among others. More recently, groups have appeared to discuss infrastructure such as Whitefield Rising, Citizens for Bengaluru, Citizens Agenda for Bengaluru, Bangalore Political Action Committee, etc. However, most of these groups are coalitions of various organizations, including various RWAs, who sometimes work independent of these coalition groups as well.

3. Greater Bangalore Municipal Corporation.

4. ‘My Garbage is Now My Concern: Why Bengaluru is Changing its Attitude Towards Waste Segregation’, Firstpost, 20 February 2016. Available online at – http://www. firstpost.com/india/my-garbage-is-now-my-concern-why-bengaluru-is-changing-its-attitude-towards-waste-segregation-2633822.html (last accessed on 5 November 2016).

5. ‘Slums Increasing in Bangalore’, Times of India, 21 August 2013, available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/Slums-increasing-in-Bangalore/articleshow/21962048.cms

6. Department of Statistics, International Labour Organization, Statistical Update on Employment in the Informal Economy, June 2012, p. 11.

7. ‘Encroachment of Footpath’, iChangemy City, available online at http://www. ichangemycity.com/bangalore/complaints/ encroachment-of-footpath-1

8. ‘Sakkardara Footpath: Illegal Vendors’ Shopping Arcade’, The Times of India, 21 September 2014, available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/Sakkardara-footpath-Illegal-vendors- shopping-arcade/articleshow/43024690.cms

9. As told to the authors in interactions with members of several Resident Welfare Associations and civic-action groups.

10. From an interaction with members of Resident Welfare Associations.

11. Amita Baviskar, ‘The Politics of the City’, Seminar 516, August 2002, available online at: http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/516/516%20amita%20baviskar.htm

12. Alternative Law Forum, ‘Of Master Plans and Illegalities in an Era of Transition’, 2007, p. 22.

13. Conversation with members of a Resident Welfare Association in East Bangalore.

14. Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law, chairperson Justice J.S. Verma (Retd), Part II: Recommendations, Recommendation 17, p. 415.

15. A. Ghertner, ‘Analysis of New Legal Discourse Behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions’, Economic and Political Weekly 43(20), 2008, pp. 57-66.

16. S. Benjamin and R. Bhuvaneswari, ‘Democracy, Inclusive Governance and Poverty in Bangalore’, IDD Working Paper, no. 26, International Development Department, Birmingham, 2001.

17. Irene Ward, How Democratic Can We Get? The Internet, the Public Sphere, and Public Discourse’, JAC 17(3), 1997, pp. 365-379. The article states, ‘On the internet, anyone can participate. Demographics of the internet are strikingly similar to the demographics of the bourgeois public sphere: male, educated and propertied. We can add to the list: living in developed countries. The absence of women and other groups – groups often already economically disadvantaged – obviously affects the kind of content being placed on the net.’

18. ‘Over 60 Lakh Vehicles on Bangalore Roads and Counting’, The Hindu, 9 May 2016. Available online at http://www. thehindu. com/news/cities/bangalore/over-60-lakh-vehicles-on-bengaluru-roads-and-counting/article8573251.ece (last accessed on 7 November 2016).