Representative image of street vendors set up stalls on the footpath at Gandhi Bazaar in Basavanagudi.
Credit: DH PHOTO
The warning of protests by the Karnataka Pragathipara Beedi Vyaparigala Sangha over delays in issuing street vendor identity and verification cards is an indictment of Bengaluru’s failure to implement an existing law. Three months after a survey, thousands of vendors remain undocumented, exposed to harassment by the police and civic officials, and punished not for illegality but for administrative apathy. Street vendors occupy an uneasy place in the city’s economy. They are essential to daily urban life, yet are routinely treated as encroachers. Without identity cards and vending certificates, even surveyed vendors are vulnerable to eviction drives, confiscation of goods, and the informal hafta system. This thrives because legal recognition has been delayed. Pedestrians and motorists, meanwhile, pay the price due to blocked footpaths and unsafe traffic bottlenecks caused by unregulated roadside activity that could have been prevented with structured management.
The tragedy is that this conflict was anticipated and addressed by law. The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, provides a framework to balance livelihoods with urban order. It mandates Town Vending Committees (TVCs) with vendor representation, periodic surveys, and demarcated vending, restricted, and no-vending zones. Crucially, the law fixes a holding capacity, capped at 2.5% of the local population. Where it is exceeded, surplus vendors are to be accommodated in nearby vending zones through relocation, not arbitrary eviction. Bengaluru’s problem is not legal ambiguity but institutional collapse. The TVCs constituted under the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike have lapsed. After the city was carved into multiple corporations, they have not been reconstituted under the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA). The current survey itself remains contested – the GBA claims to have identified 27,000 vendors, while activists estimate the number to be over one lakh. With identity cards pending, enforcement continues without a legal backbone. The result is discretion-driven governance that benefits neither vendors nor citizens.
There are workable models. Bhubaneswar, for instance, has developed vending zones through public-private partnerships, offering vendors permanent spaces while keeping footpaths clear. Bengaluru may adopt a similar approach, dividing the city into green zones where vending is permitted on wide footpaths, amber zones where it is time- or day-restricted in dense areas, and red zones such as high-traffic junctions or narrow roads where vending is prohibited. Immediate issuance of identity cards, reconstitution of TVCs, transparent zoning, and design-based solutions are not optional; they are legal obligations. What Bengaluru lacks is not a framework but the political will to implement it.