From Encroachers to Rights Holders: Rethinking the Regulation of Street Hawking in India

This Blog is Written by Surangana Bhattacharya, 2nd Year, BBA LLB, NLU Meghalaya.

Introduction

How should a street hawker be viewed in a city? A pedestrian might see a hawker as just an obstruction occupying valuable pavement space. A shopkeeper, on the other hand, may call it unfair competition because the hawker sells goods without bearing many of the costs, such as licenses, that proper businesses usually incur. However, from a hawker's perspective, these are viewed very differently. For most hawkers, the footpath is not simply a piece of public space. It is their place of work. It is the place from where they earn their daily livelihood and a family to feed and survive within a city without having alternative opportunities. Thus, there is a conflict here. How should the law weigh the public’s right to use streets and pavements against a hawker’s right to earn a living? The Indian judiciary has been trying to respond to this for decades. Along the way, it gradually reshaped the legal situation of street vendors. It shifted them from being often regarded as encroachers to being recognized as holders of constitutional rights.

From Regulation to Recognition

The first real step was Bombay Hawker's Union v. BMC (1985) While the Court accepted the role that hawkers played in urban life by ensuring readily available and sometimes cheaper daily goods, it did concede that the public streets could not be allowed to become uncontrolled commercial entities as they existed for public passage. It refused to accept a plea for total removal of hawkers but did not permit free use of streets, opting for regulation by the municipal authority through licenses etc. Later, a more important shift occurred four years later, in Sodan Singh v. New Delhi Municipal Committee (1984) The central issue before the Court was whether street vending falls within Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution which states that everyone has the right to practice any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. The Court had this to say: Kuldip Singh, J described street vending as a very "age-old vocation practiced by a lot of persons for making a livelihood". By being established as an occupation, it became protected under the said article The discussion was no longer whether hawkers should be tolerated. It became a question of whether they possessed constitutional rights. However, the Court also imposed important limitations. It held that while a hawker has a fundamental right to carry on trade, there is no fundamental right to occupy a particular spot permanently. The State holds public streets as a trustee for the public, and therefore, the rights of hawkers must coexist with the rights of pedestrians, commuters, and other users of public space. Unregulated hawking, the Court observed, could create obstruction, conflict, and disorder. Regulation was therefore not only permissible but necessary.

Refining the Framework

Once street Vending was recognized as an occupation protected by the Constitution, the judicial spotlight shifted to the next question. The question was not about whether there were rights of the hawkers or not but rather about the enforcement of rights. In Maharashtra Ekta Hawkers Union v. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that street vending is protected under Article 19(1)(g), but remains subject to reasonable restrictions under Article 19(6). The Court backed the creation of hawking and non-hawking zones. It explained that some places could legitimately bar vending due to concerns such as traffic flow, hospitals, educational institutions, security needs, or other public interests.  Regulation had to safeguard both vendors' livelihoods and the public’s practical ability to access and use urban spaces smoothly.  By the time Gainda Ram v. Municipal Corporation of Delhi (2010) reached the Supreme Court, another problem had surfaced. The issue was no longer just recognition; it was implementation. Even with decades of litigation, the authorities kept leaning on temporary schemes and ad hoc arrangements, as if nothing else was workable. The Court criticized this approach and observed that the rights of hawkers under Article 19(1)(g) and the public's right to move freely under Article 19(1)(d) were both fundamental rights. Such competing rights, it held, could not be governed through temporary administrative schemes. They required a proper statutory framework. This judicial push, coupled with recmmendations made by the National Advisory Council in 2011, eventually led to the enactment of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014. The Act sought to recognize street vending as a legitimate occupation while providing a regulatory framework.

Why Does Regulation Still Remain Difficult?

If the law has, in fact, recognized the rights of street vendors, why do these conflicts continue? Urban Scholar Ananya Roy suggests that Informality is also maintained, she suggests, by an "unmapping" of space. Indeed, in most cities the planning regulations on how public space is supposed to function for street vendors have never been sufficiently specific. If I may put it in those terms, street vending, she suggests, operates in a state that can only roughly be described as sometimes condoned, sometimes restricted, sometimes evicted. This ambiguity allows authorities to selectively tolerate, regulate, or remove vendors depending on changing political and administrative priorities. In practice, planning, laws are applied unevenly Street vendors and slum dwellers are often threatened with eviction under the banner of urban order, but problems caused by more powerful actors are frequently ignored or later regularised. Dr. Partha Chatterjee offers another explanation through his idea of "political society". According to Dr. Chatterjee, informal communities often secure protection and access to public resources through local political networks rather than through formal legal channels. In return, they become important political constituencies. The reality of survival for street vendors is often based on relationships as well as on rights. So, street vending continues to be shaped by the forces of law, politics and informal deals all acting concurrently.

Kolkata: Where Law, Politics, and Hawking Collided

Although street vending has been present in the city for centuries, the dimension it reached after partition in 1947 was huge. Thousands of refugees from East Pakistan, having no other option of making a living, took to street vending. However, the vendors' efforts during Operation Sunshine faced serious pushback from the Hawker Sangram Committee (HSC), which organized protests, filed lawsuits, and engaged in negotiations with public authorities. In the end, the operation didn’t achieve its goal; it reshaped hawkers' political standing in the city. Vendors were not seen only as people occupying public space. They became an organized political constituency, able to influence urban management and electoral politics.

The Continuing Struggle

Recent drive to evict the dwellers from the areas adjacent to Howrah, Sealdah, Dum Dum, Jadavpur railway stations has reignited the public debate over conflict between management of city spaces and right to livelihood. While the authority claims to have removed them for smooth traffic, passengers' safety, beautification of the city and to reclaim the public land, hawkers' unions and the local population are opposing the eviction and there is an argument on the absence or vague rehabilitation policy. The protests afterward show that the main question that keeps coming up in the long history of street-vending regulation remains unresolved: how can cities make public spaces usable, arranged, and accessible while also defending the livelihoods of people who depend on those same streets? Even with constitutional recognition, judicial protection, and the Street Vendors Act on paper, the tussle between regulation and livelihood continues to shape the politics of urban public space.

Conclusion

The legal story of street vending in India is often shown as a clash between hawkers and pedestrians. But in real life, it is a broader debate about cities, livelihoods, and the same public space everyone uses. Starting with the Bombay Hawkers' Union, then moving through Sodan Singh, then Maharashtra Ekta Hawkers Union, and finally Gainda Ram, the Supreme Court kept going,  towards accepting that street vending is a legitimate economic activity. It is also protected under Article 19(1)(g). At the same time, the Court continued to insist that hawkers' rights should run alongside those of pedestrians, commuters, and the wider public. Not one after another, not replace each other, but together, even when the street feels crowded. More than three decades after Sodan Singh, the main issue isn't settled. Today, the law does treat street vendors as rights holders, not just as people who “encroach” and that's it. The Street Vendors Act, 2014, also establishes a framework intended to protect them. Still, implementation is uneven, and you keep seeing arguments over public space pop up again, and the law treats street vendors as rights holders, not just as people who “encroach.” This story of street vending in India is not only about hawkers. It is ultimately about who has the right to the city and how that right should be shared, in practice, not just on paper.