Govt to give legal space to street vendors to operate

New Delhi, July 12: The government is considering bringing in a model legislation on urban street vendors to give them a legal space to earn their livelihood.

Announcing this while inaugurating a seminar on Street Vendors, Minister for Urban Employment and Poverty Alleviation Kumari Selja today called upon states to expedite sending their responses to the revised draft of national policy on the subject prepared by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector(NCEUS).

''It was high time now that street vendors were given their due.

They provide articles of daily use to people's doorsteps but are often harassed by police and local authorities due to lack of well defined norms and rights,'' Ms Selja said.

Despite wide proliferation of the trades included in street vending and its increasing social and economic acceptability, there are a very few proactive laws to govern this segment, the Minister said.

The Minister also said urban areas were projected to grow further and with them the population of street vendors, and under such circumstances, the present regime of 'unobtrusive' control as exercised through the plethora of police and municipal laws shall only result in greater number of street vendors operating from across the line of legality.

On this occasion, Chairman of the NCEUS Arjun Sengupta made a presentation on the draft national policy according to which every new colony or market constructed should have a space for street vendors and they should be alllowed to operate in private residential areas with the permission of residents.

Besides a Town Vending Committee should be constituted to deal with the problems and issues related to street vendors.

The draft also provided that no vendors should be evicted before beinf served a notice and there should be a system of registration of street vendors.

Ms Selja told reporters later that her Ministry would press for inclusion of the points made by Mr Sengupta in the proposed Unorganised Sector Workers Bill. The rights of street vendors and pedestrians over the public space were highlighted by the Supreme Court in two landmark judgements in 1989 and 2006.

The apex court had also emphasised the need to notify the hawking zones and the type of goods to be sold by vendors.

''Our policy and action plans have to be in conformity with the observations of the spex court in this regard,'' said Ms Selja.

Ms Selja said some of action points suggested to states are sensitisation of officers towards the plight of street vendors, documentation of best practices on urban street vending, allocation of space in the Master Plan and Zonal Plans for hawkers, medical insurance for them, social security and access to credit to the urban street vending and setting up of monitoring committees to oversee the implementation of the action plan.

However, she said, the states' response has been lukewarm. She hoped that the seminar, which was attended by representatives of various states would help in giving a wider and deeper perspective to the proposed new national policy on urban street vendors.

UNI