Mumbai’s Hawkers: We Don’t Even Know How To Deal With Them

Hawkers are not new to Mumbai nor are the slums. They are in fact distinct features of the city to the extent that hawkers’ numbers are only an estimate despite their being ubiquitous. The Census in the past has shown that six out of ten Mumbai residents live in its slums.

Getting rid of them is not easy. Just over a fortnight ago the hawkers were evicted from Bandra’s Hill Road and a few other spots and they are trickling back to do their business. The slums, unlike hawkers, cannot be evicted unless they are provided replacement housing.

There is a link between the two. Slums are from where the hawkers come, and slums are where the poor, even if not bone-poor, live. Slums, it so happens, have mostly the migrants who risk everything to anchor themselves in search of livelihoods. That is why the Supreme Court had linked hawking and right to livelihood.

But the mean of having hawkers and not allowing them to overrun every available space in congested public spaces remains elusive. There hardly is a city with as many slum dwellers, and probably as many hawkers. The latter serve the middle class as well as the poor who too traverse the city’s roads and stop to pick up a thing or two, to run their lives.

However, despite making people to walk on the carriageway of the thoroughfares, and do a hop-skip-and-jump on sidewalks, they are patronised. People grumble about them even on the foot overbridges in the railway stations but wade on regardless. The fish, it so happens, never complain that the water they swim in makes them wet.

But to the Hill Road residents—or their ilk—hawkers are a serious issue. They can do without them. On the Linking Road too, the residents can seek their eviction, and probably with good reason. For, those who do not or cannot go to Fashion Street in South Mumbai, visit and crowd Linking Road. Daytime population densities can be hard to live in.

It is much like the genteel not wanting slums in their midst for – oh, they are such an eyesore. But the flows from the eyesore keeps their lives ticking well – the bai, the khanawali, the plumber, the driver comes from that eyesore. If not, they’d be paying an arm for their services.

Talking of Fashion Street, it, as well as the booksellers who colonised the footpaths along the High Court and the Central Telegraph Office, together reveal the ambivalence of Mumbai towards the issue of hawkers. Fashion Street vendors were regularised, given stalls, and asked to keep space for pedestrians too. The booksellers were evicted.

Apparently, hawkers are good in one place and not in another. In rest of the places, like the slums, they were allowed to proliferate by a tight league of the local politicians, the local goons, and petty officials who had the brief to curb them. The hawkers’ number apparently kept pace with the growth of the slums. In mid-1950s, slums barely accommodated five per cent of the city’s population which by now has grown by more than 12 times.

The logic follows that if there are laws which protect slum dwellers if they have been in the dwellings prior to 1995, then the hawkers too should get a similar consideration. The two cannot be separated because they are linked in more ways than one. If slums are untouched—mostly, that is—even if they sprang up after 1995, why should the hawkers suffer? Slums have come up on all lands – civic, state and Central government and parastatals’ parcels, huge and small.

Hawkers are usually on civic lands; civic bodies own sidewalks. If the city’s civic body has been at a wits’ end, assuming that it really means to ensure hawkers-free sidewalks, then it has to blame itself for the plight. So much so, after the late 1980s, the civic body even stopped counting the number of hawkers there. SS Tinaikar, as Commissioner of Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, had estimated their size at 1.4 lakh.

Now even the hawkers’ unions only have estimates, ranging from three lakh to ten.

However, to its credit, the civic body, which thinks it has now some 18,000 hawkers who have licences to do sell their wares, had charged a fee for many more of them. It was towards the cleanup of the streets dirtied by the hawkers. Suddenly, that practice was ended because it presumed a kind of tacit title being awarded by the nominal fee.

Now the hawkers’ issue has snowballed into a size that no one can dare think is solvable. Small ideas failed because they were not thought out. Hawking zones were laid out on streets where the crowds don’t come; Bhau Daji Road is not as attractive as Matunga Station which ensures higher footfalls.

It had thought that mere eviction and seizure of their wares was enough to discourage them from returning to the streets, because to secure their return, they had to pay three times the value of the confiscated goods. There was no way it could be calculated because hawkers’ business is entirely in the grey – no receipts for goods bought or sold.

In fact, after the theatrics of periodic drives to embellish their records or the whims of a superior, these drives led to return of the goods for a fee, not, of course, the official penalty thrice their value. The city government does not even have a place to store these confiscated goods. Neither does it have a procedure for their disposal should they remain unclaimed.

The catch is here: why should the hawker return to claim it at that penal cost if he is not supposed to hawk?

Even if each street were to have a Vasant Dhoble patrolling it, the problem would persist because dealing with hawkers alone is not the single brief of the police. They have other things to do and the manpower in police stations is so low that Mumbai’s crime chart is already a matter of concern. No wonder even the four constables deployed on Hill Road had been assigned elsewhere by this mid-week.

However, MCGM which failed in the task of protecting land owned by it and which it has to provide for the safety of the pedestrians now thinks that the understaffed police are its saviour. It is contemplating an award of Rs 1 lakh for a police station and Rs 25,000 for a beat chowky if they can prevent nuisance on the streets.

Nuisance, under municipal laws, are of a variety. They range from urinating, spitting, throwing garbage. The police, under their rules, are empowered to deal with them under Section 115. If they cause obstruction- which hawkers cause – they can be dealt with under Section 102. That is why Dhoble zeroed in on Hill Street.

But Rs 1 lakh to the police on a street teeming with hawkers is chicken feed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a single ‘drive’ every now and then for haftas on a single day can generate that much and more. What prize the incentives then?

It would perhaps be practical to ensure that hawkers are regulated in terms of the widths of the footpaths they occupy, and stay away from the carriage ways which are now the refuge of the pedestrian needing to dodge between parked cars, and don’t dirty the place. Even the might of the MCGM and the police cannot get them off the streets.