Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives. There may be some merit in this, but clearly, we need to look at the hawkers issue more broadly. For quite some time now, many middle-class citizens groups have urged strict action against hawkers,
Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
There may be some merit in this, but clearly, we need to look at the hawkers issue more broadly. For quite some time now, many middle-class citizens groups have
urged strict action against hawkers, asking residents not to favour their business. The terms routinely used to refer to hawkers and vendors is “menace”, with their
everyday businesses described as “encroachments” on public space. This, despite the fact that an existing 2014 central law, the Street Vendors (Protection of
Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, protects their presence as a part of the right to livelihood. The law specifies the number of licensed hawkers
permitted and outlines the process to implement a fair street vending policy. Mumbai and other cities have failed to implement the law to date, with the Mumbai
municipality having frozen hawker licenses since 1978. As a result, only a fraction of Mumbai’s hawkers are licensed. Hawkers desire legal status — their illegality
makes them vulnerable to extortion and harassment by a whole range of State and non-State actors.
Unfortunately, by looking upon the hawkers question as only a clearing of pavements issue, we have neglected to see their contribution in several other ways. Firstly,
hawkers are not the only ones sullying our pavements. But they are far easier to target as villains than the middle-class who use pavements for car parking and
shops/restaurants who unabashedly extend their shopfronts onto footpaths. Secondly, hawking is also an employment issue. It provides the urban poor a means to
earn a legitimate livelihood, and in fact, many sell goods produced in small-scale or home-based industries.
What makes hawkers vulnerable to extortion?
1). Their poverty
2). The fact that they do not have unions
3). Their illiteracy
4). Authorities not issuing them licences
