The Street Vendors Act 2014 begins from a fact that Indian municipal law spent a century refusing to state: the person selling vegetables from a cart at the corner of a public street is not an obstruction who happens to earn a living, but a worker exercising a trade, whose presence on that street raises a question of legal right before it raises a question of traffic management. The statute Parliament enacted in 2014, the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, was the first central law to build an entire regulatory structure on that premise. It did not merely restrain eviction drives. It prescribed a sequence: a survey to identify every vendor in a town, a certificate of vending issued to each person the survey found, a plan for street vending prepared for the town, vending zones declared under that plan, and only then, at the end of the sequence and hedged with notice and a right to a new site, any relocation at all. The single provision on which the whole structure turns is a sentence of eleven operative words in Section 3: no street vendor shall be evicted or relocated till the survey has been completed and the certificate of vending is issued to all street vendors. A vendor, a municipal official or a residents association that understands that sentence, and understands what the Act builds around it, understands the statute. A reader who finishes this article will know what the Act protects, what it requires before anyone may lawfully be moved, how its committees and zones are meant to work, where the limits of the right lie, and why the sequence the Act prescribes has so rarely been begun.

The tension inside the statute is genuine and the Act does not pretend otherwise. Streets and footpaths are shared space, and the claims on them conflict. A vendor’s cart occupies pavement that a pedestrian, including an elderly pedestrian or a person using a wheelchair, needs for passage. A market that grows without limit can strangle the road it feeds on. The Act answers that conflict not by denying it but by assigning it to a process: a committee on which vendors themselves sit beside the municipality, the police and the residents, a plan that must accommodate the vendors who exist while ensuring that commuters can move freely, and zones that separate the places where vending is free, where it is restricted and where it is barred. Whether that process deserves confidence is the argument this article takes up at the end. The starting point is what the law was before the process existed.

Street vending before the Street Vendors Act 2014

Before 2014, the legal position of a street vendor in India was assembled from instruments that had never been designed to answer the question the vendor posed. The governing texts were the municipal Acts of the states, statutes concerned with sanitation, obstruction and the licensing of trades, under which vending on a public street appeared principally as a species of encroachment. A municipal corporation could license hawkers in some cities and did, on terms it set and could withdraw; in most places the operative legal category was not the licence but the removal power, the authority of the municipal commissioner or the police to clear an obstruction from a public place. The vendor who paid a daily fee to a market inspector, or a tehbazari charge for the use of a patch of pavement, held a receipt rather than a right, and the receipt answered no question about tomorrow. Periodic eviction drives, conducted before festivals, official visits, sporting events and beautification projects, were the visible edge of this legal structure: the vendor’s stock could be lifted, the cart impounded, and the pitch lost, with the burden falling on the vendor to negotiate a return. The law saw the street clearly and the livelihood on it hardly at all.

The deeper reason was the place of street vending in the wider world of Indian work. Vending is informal work, carried on outside employment relationships, without a wage, a workplace provided by an employer, or the protections that attach to either, and it sits inside the much larger informal economy that the general framework of Indian labour law, examined in the guide to the Indian labour law framework, has always reached imperfectly. The vendor is self-employed in the strictest sense: the capital is a cart and a day’s stock, the credit is borrowed at rates no bank would quote, and the workplace is a piece of public space held on sufferance. That structure explains both the vulnerability and the stubbornness of the trade. A person with no other means of livelihood, which is the very description the Act later builds into its certificate conditions, does not stop vending when a drive clears a street. The trade re-forms a lane away, because the alternative to vending is not another job but no income. Municipal law that treated this activity purely as obstruction was therefore in permanent collision with economic fact, and the collision produced the characteristic pattern of the pre-2014 decades: enforcement that was episodic, negotiable and corruptible, in which the operative question at any pitch was not what the law said but what the local equilibrium between inspectors, police, vendors and residents happened to be.

The field within which this played out was local government. Streets, markets and footpaths are municipal subjects, administered by municipal corporations, councils and nagar panchayats under the constitutional scheme for urban local bodies, and the broader field of local government law in India supplies the institutional setting: a local authority with land-use and licensing powers, chronically short of staff and money, answerable to elected councillors for the state of the streets and under pressure from residents on one side and from the political cost of evictions on the other. What that field lacked before 2014 was any statutory duty owed to the vendor as such. The municipality owed duties about sanitation and passage. It owed the vendor nothing except the limits of its own removal powers, and courts intervened case by case, city by city, without a general text to interpret. The result was a patchwork in which a vendor’s security depended on the litigation history of the particular city. Where a court had framed a scheme, there were zones and licences of a kind. Where none had, there was the drive.

The constitutional road to the Street Vendors Act 2014

The statute’s premises were laid down by the Supreme Court over three decades, and the article of the Constitution that did the work was the freedom to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business, guaranteed by Article 19(1)(g) and subject to reasonable restrictions under Article 19(6). In Bombay Hawkers’ Union versus Bombay Municipal Corporation, decided in 1985, the Court accepted that hawking on public streets is a trade within that freedom and that the answer to its conflicts with other uses of the street was regulation by zones, with hawking permitted in some areas, restricted in others and barred near places such as railway stations, places of worship, schools and hospitals where the competing claims were strongest. The same year, in Olga Tellis versus Bombay Municipal Corporation, the Court held that the right to livelihood is part of the right to life under Article 21, in a case about pavement dwellers facing eviction: a pavement is not a chosen address, the Court reasoned, but the place from which a poor person’s work is reached, and to remove the dwelling without regard to the livelihood it supports is to take away the means of living itself. Between them, the two decisions fixed the poles of the subject. Vending was a right. Vending could be regulated. What nobody had yet supplied was the regulation.

For Delhi, the Court supplied it provisionally in Sodan Singh versus New Delhi Municipal Committee in 1989. The petitions came from squatters and hawkers whom the New Delhi Municipal Committee had sought to remove, and the Court held that hawking on pavements and public streets falls within Article 19(1)(g), that the right is subject to reasonable restrictions, and that the municipal body was bound to frame and implement a scheme that identified where squatting and hawking could be permitted and allotted sites in an orderly way. The significance of Sodan Singh is less its holding, which the 1985 cases had prepared, than its insistence that the scheme actually be framed: the right was not to wait indefinitely on administrative convenience. A series of later orders in the same litigation returned to the same point, as committees were appointed, reports filed and implementation found wanting, and the pattern that the 2014 Act would eventually be drafted against was set in these decades: courts pronouncing that vending must be regulated by scheme rather than suppressed by drive, and municipalities producing schemes slowly, partially, or not at all.

Mumbai replayed the same sequence on a larger canvas. In Maharashtra Ekta Hawkers Union versus Municipal Corporation, Greater Mumbai, in 2004, the Supreme Court approved a framework of hawking and non-hawking zones for Greater Mumbai built on the approach of the 1985 hawking decision, fixed conditions for pitches and licences, and directed implementation. The framework existed on paper for years while the underlying conflict continued, and the litigation returned. In September 2013, in the same line of cases, the Court issued detailed directions requiring the National Policy on Urban Street Vendors of 2009 to be given effect across the states until a statute took its place, including the constitution of committees of the kind the policy prescribed. The direction captured the constitutional oddity of the position in 2013: the operative national framework for a fundamental right was an executive policy, revised once and binding on no one, being enforced by a court because the legislature had not yet acted.

The executive had in fact been moving, at the speed of policy. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation framed a National Policy for Urban Street Vendors in 2004 and revised it as the National Policy on Urban Street Vendors in 2009, proposing legal status for vendors, demarcation of vending zones around natural markets, representation of vendors in decision-making, and protection from harassment. In 2009 the Ministry also circulated a model Bill to the states, inviting state legislation; because a model Bill binds nobody, few states made progress with it. The turn came in 2010, in Gainda Ram versus Municipal Corporation of Delhi, where the Supreme Court, dealing with Delhi’s vendors and the city’s own scheme, recorded the inadequacy of policy-based protection and directed the government to work out a central law for street vendors. A draft Bill was made public in November 2011, prepared with the involvement of the National Advisory Council, and the Union Cabinet approved the Bill in August 2012. The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill, 2012 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 6 September 2012 by Kumari Selja, the Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. It was passed by the Lok Sabha on 6 September 2013 and by the Rajya Sabha on 19 February 2014, received the assent of the President on 4 March 2014, and came into force on 1 May 2014 as Act 7 of 2014. Thirty years after the hawking cases began, the regulation the courts had demanded existed as a statute, and the question changed from whether there would be a law to what the law, read closely, actually does.

Two features of the passage deserve record because they explain choices in the enacted text. The first is legislative competence. Street space and municipal government are state subjects, and a central Act on street vending needed a constitutional home; the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, which examined the Bill under the chairmanship of Sharad Yadav and submitted its twenty-third report on 13 March 2013, recorded that the Law Ministry and the Attorney General had opined that the proposed legislation was covered by Items 20, 23 and 24 of the Concurrent List, the entries on economic and social planning, on social security and social insurance, and on the welfare of labour. The Act is therefore best understood, in competence terms, as planning and labour welfare legislation that operates on municipal ground, which is why it works by commanding the constitution of committees and the preparation of plans rather than by displacing the municipal Acts, and why Section 33’s overriding effect, considered below, is drafted as a supremacy clause rather than a repeal. The second feature is what the committee stage changed. The Standing Committee recommended, as recorded in the summary of its report published by PRS Legislative Research, that a time limit be set for the issue of the certificate, proposing one month; that the certificate be renewable, proposing renewal every three years; and that the local authority be required to consult the Town Vending Committee before any relocation or eviction, where the Bill had spoken of relocation on grounds that included public nuisance and obstruction to traffic. The Bill as introduced had provided a notice period of seven days before relocation. The enacted Act is stronger than the Bill at each of these points in the direction the Committee pressed: relocation and the declaration of no-vending zones proceed on the recommendation of the Committee under Section 18(1), the notice is thirty days under Section 18(3), and the periods for issuing and renewing certificates are fixed publicly through the scheme and the vendor’s charter rather than left to the pace of an office. The gap between the introduced Bill and the enacted text, which the legislative history framework in this series treats as the analytical heart of a passage story, runs here consistently in favour of process, and the organised campaign of the vendors’ movement, which presented its amendments to the Committee through the National Association of Street Vendors of India in November and December 2012, is part of the explanation the record supports. The campaign’s public milestones are part of the documented history of the Act and explain its timing. NASVI’s own account records a Street Vendors Parliament assembled in Delhi on 13 March 2013, the day the Standing Committee’s report was tabled, the Union Cabinet’s approval of the reworked Bill on 1 May 2013, and, after the Bill’s passage in the Lok Sabha had been secured and the Rajya Sabha remained, a Rehri Patri Sansad at Jantar Mantar on 31 January 2014 and marches by vendors in the capital in the first days of February 2014 demanding that the upper House end what the campaign described as extortion and terror by police and municipal agencies. The Rajya Sabha passed the Bill on 19 February 2014, in the last days of the Fifteenth Lok Sabha’s life, and the assent followed on 4 March. The sequence matters to the reading of the text: this is a statute whose final form was negotiated in public with the constituency it governs, in the same months in which that constituency was assembled in the capital, and the strength of its process provisions, the elected committee, the hearing before cancellation, the thirty days of notice, is the deposit of that negotiation in the law.

How the Street Vendors Act 2014 is structured

The Act is a short statute with a long shadow: thirty-nine sections in ten chapters, followed by two Schedules. Its architecture matters because the operative protections sit in the sequencing of its parts, and a reader who knows where each subject lives in the text can find the answer to most practical questions by asking which chapter it belongs to. Chapter I carries the short title, extent and definitions. Chapter II, on the regulation of street vending, contains the survey, the certificate and its conditions, categories, criteria, fees, validity, cancellation and appeal, in Sections 3 to 11. Chapter III states the rights and obligations of street vendors in Sections 12 to 17. Chapter IV deals with relocation and eviction in Sections 18 and 19. Chapter V creates the dispute redressal mechanism in Section 20. Chapter VI, a single section, Section 21, requires the plan for street vending. Chapter VII constitutes the Town Vending Committee and its working in Sections 22 to 26. Chapter VIII, Section 27, addresses prevention of harassment. Chapter IX, Section 28, contains the penalties. Chapter X gathers the miscellaneous provisions, Sections 29 to 39, including the bar on reading the Act as conferring ownership rights, the promotional measures, the overriding effect, and the powers to make rules, bye-laws and the scheme. The First Schedule sets out what the plan for street vending must contain and the principles for declaring no-vending zones. The Second Schedule lists the matters a state scheme must cover.

The definitions in Section 2 do quiet but decisive work. A street vendor is a person engaged in vending articles, goods, wares, food items or merchandise of everyday use, or offering services to the general public, in a street, lane, sidewalk, footpath, pavement, public park or any other public place or private area, from a temporary built up structure or by moving from place to place, and the definition expressly includes a hawker, a peddler and a squatter, together with synonymous local terms. The inclusion of the squatter, a word municipal enforcement used as a label of illegality, inside the statutory definition of the person the Act protects is a deliberate drafting choice: the Act does not ask a vendor to prove prior legality as the price of recognition. A stationary vendor vends on a regular basis at a specific location; a mobile vendor moves from place to place. A natural market is a market where sellers and buyers have traditionally congregated, determined as such by the local authority on the recommendation of the Town Vending Committee, and the concept returns in the First Schedule, where a natural market may not be declared a no-vending zone. A vending zone is an area designated by the local authority, on the recommendation of the Committee, for the specific use of street vendors, and its holding capacity is the maximum number of vendors the zone can take, determined by the local authority on the Committee’s recommendations. The local authority itself is defined to include the municipal corporation, council or nagar panchayat and, significantly, the planning authority which regulates land use in the city or town, so that the body that draws the master plan is inside the Act’s machinery rather than outside it.

Three features of the frame should be held in mind before the operative provisions are read. The first is that the Act is executed almost entirely through instruments it requires others to make: each appropriate Government had to frame a scheme within six months of commencement under Section 38, covering the matters in the Second Schedule, and to make rules within one year under Section 36; local authorities make bye-laws under Section 37. The statute’s promises are therefore conditional on subordinate legislation in every state, and the gap between the Act and its local scheme is the space in which implementation later succeeded or failed. The second is commencement and extent: the Act came into force on 1 May 2014, extended as enacted to the whole of India except the then State of Jammu and Kashmir, and by Section 1(4) it does not apply to land, premises and trains owned and controlled by the Railways. The third is Section 33, which gives the Act overriding effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent in any other law: the municipal removal powers under which vendors had been cleared for a century continue to exist, but from 1 May 2014 they have to be exercised through the Act’s sequence, and to the extent of any inconsistency the Act prevails.

The survey and the bar on eviction under the Street Vendors Act 2014

Section 3 is the hinge of the statute, and it rewards slow reading. Its first sub-section requires the Town Vending Committee to conduct a survey of all existing street vendors within the area under its jurisdiction, within the period and in the manner the scheme specifies, and provides that a subsequent survey shall be carried out at least once in every five years. The survey is not a census of an abstraction. It is the act of identification on which every later right depends: the certificate issues to persons the survey has found, the plan must accommodate the persons the survey has counted, and the holding capacity of zones is measured against their number. Its second sub-section directs the Committee to ensure that all existing street vendors identified in the survey are accommodated in the vending zones, subject to a norm conforming to two and a half per cent of the population of the ward or zone or town or city, as the case may be, in accordance with the plan for street vending and the holding capacity of the vending zones. Its third sub-section then states the protection in terms that admit no exception: no street vendor shall be evicted or, as the case may be, relocated till the survey specified under sub-section (1) has been completed and the certificate of vending is issued to all street vendors.

How many street vendors must a plan accommodate?

The norm is two and a half per cent of the population of the ward, zone, town or city. Section 3(2) requires the Town Vending Committee to ensure that vendors identified in the survey are accommodated subject to a norm conforming to that proportion, and the First Schedule repeats the norm as the plan’s first requirement.

The placement of the survey at the head of the Act is the statute’s central design decision, and it is worth understanding why the draftsman put it there rather than treating it as an administrative preliminary. Every abuse the older law permitted began with anonymous enforcement against unidentified people: a drive does not evict named certificate holders after notice, it clears a street of persons whose names the authority has never recorded. Identification reverses the posture of the parties. A surveyed vendor is a known person with a recorded place, a recorded trade and a document trail, and an authority dealing with a known person must deal by process rather than by drive. The eviction bar in Section 3(3) is the enforcement mechanism of that reversal. It does not say that eviction is disfavoured, discouraged or subject to guidelines. It removes the power to evict or relocate any street vendor until two conditions are both satisfied: the survey is complete, and certificates have been issued to all street vendors. Until then, the legal answer to the question whether a particular vendor may be moved is that the authority has not yet acquired the power to move anyone. This is the namable claim at the heart of the pillar: under the Street Vendors Act, protection is sequential, and the sequence is rarely begun, because the first step of the sequence is the one that disables the authority’s most familiar instrument until the authority itself has done the work the statute assigns to it.

The First Schedule adds a second, less noticed lock on the same door. Among the principles governing the declaration of no-vending zones, the Schedule provides that till such time as the survey has not been carried out and the plan for street vending has not been formulated, no zone shall be declared as a no-vending zone. The consequence is that the pre-2014 geography of prohibition, the lists of streets and areas that municipalities had declared closed to hawking under their own schemes and bye-laws, cannot simply be carried into the new regime as no-vending zones. A no-vending zone under the Act is a creature of the plan, and the plan is a creature of the survey; until both exist, the category has no lawful content, whatever older lists say. Read together, Section 3(3) and the First Schedule mean that a local authority which has done none of the Act’s work is doubly disabled: it cannot move a vendor, and it cannot declare the vendor’s street closed. What it retains, and what the counter-reading of the Act rightly emphasises, is everything that follows once the work is done, and the honest assessment of the statute must hold both halves together: the bar is absolute in terms, and it is a bar on sequence, not on regulation.

The certificate of vending

The certificate of vending is the document that converts the survey’s identification into an individual legal position, and Sections 4 to 11 build the complete law of that document: who receives it, on what undertaking, in which categories, by what criteria, at what fee, for how long, and how it may be taken away. Section 4(1) provides that every street vendor identified in the survey who has completed the age of fourteen years, or such age as the appropriate Government prescribes, shall be issued a certificate of vending by the Town Vending Committee, subject to the terms and conditions and within the period the scheme specifies, including the restrictions in the plan for street vending. A proviso performs the transition from the old world: a person who held a certificate of vending before the Act commenced, whether called a licence or any other form of permission, and whether as a stationary vendor, a mobile vendor or under any other category, is deemed to be a street vendor for that category for the period of that permission, whether or not the survey has included that person. The old tehbazari receipt and the municipal licence, which conferred nothing enforceable, are thus picked up and given statutory effect for their term, rather than extinguished by the new regime.

Section 4(2) answers the objection that a survey freezes the trade at a moment in time. In the intervening period between two surveys, a person who seeks to vend may be granted a certificate of vending by the Town Vending Committee, subject to the scheme, the plan and the holding capacity of the vending zones. New entrants are therefore not locked out for five years awaiting the next survey; they enter through the Committee, against the discipline of the plan and the capacity of the zones. Section 4(3) then deals with scarcity honestly. Where the number of vendors identified, or of persons seeking to vend, exceeds the holding capacity of a vending zone and the number to be accommodated there, the Committee shall carry out a draw of lots for issuing certificates for that zone, and the remaining persons shall be accommodated in an adjoining vending zone, expressly to avoid relocation. The choice of a lottery, rather than a queue, a price or an official discretion, is itself a statement about the history of the subject: allocation of pitches was the point at which the old system was most corruptible, and a draw of lots is a procedure that an inspector cannot sell.

What undertaking must a vendor give before the certificate is issued?

Section 5 requires the vendor, before a certificate is issued, to give the Town Vending Committee an undertaking on three points: to carry on the business himself or through a member of his family, to have no other means of livelihood, and not to transfer in any manner, including by rent, the certificate or the place specified in it.

The three limbs of the Section 5 undertaking define the Act’s conception of the person it protects. The certificate is a livelihood instrument for a person who has no other means of livelihood, to be worked personally or within the family; it is not a tradeable asset, a sub-lettable pitch right or a speculative claim on public space. That is why transfer is barred in every manner, including rent: the mischief the draftsman had in view is the familiar figure of the absentee holder who collects rent from the person actually vending, recreating inside the new regime the intermediary extraction of the old one. Section 5(2) then tempers the personal character of the certificate with a family succession rule of real practical importance.

Who may vend in the place of a certificate holder who dies or is disabled?

Where a certificate holder dies, or suffers permanent disability or illness, Section 5(2) allows one family member to vend in his place for the certificate’s remaining validity, in a stated order of priority: the spouse first, then a dependent child. Disputes about entitlement are decided by the grievance committee under Section 20.

The remaining certificate provisions complete a recognisably administrative-law scheme. Section 6 fixes the categories: a stationary vendor, a mobile vendor, or any other category the scheme specifies, with the certificate recording the vending zone, the days and timings of vending and the conditions and restrictions, and with an identity card issued to every certificate holder. Section 7 leaves the detailed criteria to the scheme and expressly contemplates preference for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, women, persons with disabilities and minorities, so that scarcity, where the draw of lots or the criteria must choose, is resolved with a social ordering rather than by influence. Section 8 imposes the vending fee the scheme specifies; Section 9 leaves validity and renewal to the scheme; and Section 26, taken up with the Committee below, requires the Committee to publish a street vendor’s charter stating the time within which certificates will be issued and renewed, which converts the scheme’s periods into a public promise against which delay can be measured. Section 10 is the disciplinary provision: the Committee may cancel or suspend a certificate where the vendor has breached its conditions or the terms of the Act, the rules or the scheme, or where the certificate was secured by misrepresentation or fraud, but the proviso is mandatory in form: no cancellation or suspension shall be made unless an opportunity of hearing has been given to the street vendor. Section 11 gives an appeal from the Committee’s decisions on the issue, cancellation or suspension of a certificate to the local authority, which likewise may not dispose of the appeal without hearing the appellant. The sequence of hearing and appeal is not decoration. In the old regime the withdrawal of permission was typically unreasoned and unappealable; under the Act the certificate, once issued, can be removed only through a process whose two minimum features, a hearing before and an appeal after, are written into the statute itself.

Rights of vendors and the duties that travel with them

Chapter III states the position of the certificate holder in six short sections whose brevity should not be mistaken for thinness. Section 12(1) provides that every street vendor shall have the right to carry on the business of street vending activities in accordance with the terms and conditions mentioned in the certificate of vending. The right is real but it is a right to vend as certified: at the place, on the days, at the timings and under the conditions the certificate records. Section 12(2) states the corresponding exclusion, that where an area or space has been earmarked as a no-vending zone, no street vendor shall carry out vending activities in that zone. Section 13 gives the right that matters most when the machinery of relocation is set in motion: every street vendor who possesses a certificate of vending shall, in case of relocation under Section 18, be entitled to a new site or area for carrying out vending activities, as determined by the local authority in consultation with the Town Vending Committee. Relocation under the Act is therefore never, in law, a simple removal. It is a move, to a site the authority must identify through the Committee, and a relocation order that names no new site does not satisfy the section.

The duties in Sections 14 to 17 are the reciprocal face of the certificate and they are pitched at the level of the street rather than the statute book. A vendor who occupies space on a time-sharing basis shall remove his goods and wares every day at the end of the time-sharing period. Every vendor shall maintain cleanliness and public hygiene in the vending zones and the adjoining areas, shall maintain civic amenities and public property in the vending zone in good condition and not damage them, and shall pay the periodic maintenance charges the local authority determines for the civic amenities and facilities provided in the zones. These provisions matter to the balance of the Act’s argument. The residents’ complaint about vending is, in its strongest form, a complaint about hygiene, obstruction and damage to shared amenities; Sections 15 and 16 convert that complaint into statutory duties owed by every vendor as a condition of the regime, enforceable through the certificate, and give the honest official a text to point to that is not the removal power.

Chapter VIII adds the provision that vendors’ organisations cite most often after Section 3(3) itself. Section 27 provides that, notwithstanding anything contained in any other law, no street vendor who carries on vending activities in accordance with the terms and conditions of the certificate of vending shall be prevented from exercising such rights by any person, or by the police, or by any other authority exercising powers under any other law. The section is aimed at a precise experience: the vendor whose papers are in order and who is still moved on, charged informally, or cleared by a force acting under a general power in a municipal or police Act. Section 27 does not make the certificate holder immune from the Act’s own discipline; a vendor vending outside the certificate’s terms is outside the section’s protection. What it does is close the bypass around the statute: an authority that wishes to act against a compliant vendor must act under the Act, with its hearings, notices and appeals, and may not reach the same result by a shorter road under another law.

The Town Vending Committee

Every institution in the Act runs through the Town Vending Committee, and Section 22 prescribes its composition with a specificity that is itself the reform. The appropriate Government provides by rules for the term and manner of constituting a Committee in each local authority, and may constitute more than one Committee, or one for each zone or ward. The Chairperson is the Municipal Commissioner or the Chief Executive Officer of the local authority. The other members are nominated by the appropriate Government to represent a stated spread of interests: the local authority, its medical officer, the planning authority, the traffic police, the police, associations of street vendors, market associations, traders associations, non-governmental organisations, community based organisations, resident welfare associations, banks and such other interests as the government deems proper. Two numerical floors then discipline the nominations. The members representing non-governmental and community based organisations shall not be less than ten per cent of the Committee. And the members representing the street vendors shall not be less than forty per cent of the total membership, and they shall be elected by the street vendors themselves in the manner prescribed. Of the members representing the street vendors, one third shall be from amongst women vendors, and due representation shall be given to the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, minorities and persons with disabilities from amongst the vendor representatives.

Read against the history, each element of that composition answers a known failure. Vendor representation at forty per cent, filled by election rather than nomination, ends the position in which the body deciding where vending may occur contained no one who vended. The one third share for women vendors recognises the composition of the trade itself, in which women form a large part of the workforce in food, flower, garment and household-goods vending and were invisible in the older licensing offices. The presence of the planning authority ties the Committee to the master plan process, so that vending space is argued for inside land-use planning rather than conceded after it. The presence of resident welfare associations and traders gives the counter-interest a seat and a vote inside the room, which is the Act’s answer to the charge that it hears only one side: the residents’ case is not excluded from the machinery, it is institutionalised within it, and must persuade a body on which the people it seeks to move are the largest single bloc. Committee decisions, Section 23 requires, shall be notified along with the reasons for taking them, a small provision with a large effect, since a reasoned and notified decision is one that can be challenged, audited and compared with the Act. Section 24 lets the Committee associate persons whose assistance or advice it desires; Section 25 obliges the local authority to provide the Committee with office space and employees; and Section 26 lays on the Committee the continuing public duties of publishing the street vendor’s charter, maintaining an up to date database of registered vendors and certificate holders, with the stall allotted, the nature of business and the category recorded, and carrying out a social audit of its own activities. A committee that publishes its charter, keeps its register and audits itself is, in design, the opposite of the licensing window of the old regime. In practice, as the implementation record below shows, the composition rules in Section 22 are among the provisions most often honoured in the breach, and a Committee constituted without the statutory proportion of elected vendor members is not a defective approximation of the Act’s body but a different body, deciding questions the Act assigns to a representative one. Vendor associations preparing for a Committee election, and residents associations preparing their own representations, increasingly circulate the survey list and the draft zone maps as presentations that members can open and read through an online PowerPoint viewer before the meeting at which the decisions are actually taken.

Vending zones and the plan for street vending

The plan for street vending is the document in which the Act’s promises take spatial form, and Section 21 requires every local authority, in consultation with the planning authority and on the recommendations of the Town Vending Committee, to prepare such a plan once in every five years, covering the matters in the First Schedule, and to submit it to the appropriate Government for approval, with the Government determining the norms applicable before the plan is notified. The five-year cycle of the plan matches the five-year cycle of the survey, and the correspondence is deliberate: each new survey refreshes the count of vendors, and each new plan must find room for the vendors the count establishes, in a city whose population, roads and markets have themselves moved. A vending zone, in the Act’s definition, is designated by the local authority on the Committee’s recommendations, and the First Schedule requires the plan to sort the city’s spaces into three kinds: restriction-free-vending zones, where vending proceeds without special restriction; restricted vending zones, where it proceeds subject to restrictions, of which time-sharing is the characteristic example; and no-vending zones, where it is barred. The local authority’s bye-law power under Section 37 then regulates the manner of vending within each kind of zone, together with maintenance charges, penalties, traffic, and the quality of products and public health and hygiene standards in the zones.

One quantity in this machinery deserves a moment of suspicion, because so much turns on it: the holding capacity of a vending zone, defined in Section 2 as the maximum number of street vendors who can be accommodated in the zone, determined by the local authority on the recommendations of the Town Vending Committee. Holding capacity is the valve of the whole system. The population norm of two and a half per cent states how many vendors a town should accommodate in the aggregate; the holding capacity of each zone states how many a particular street, market or ground shall take, and the sum of the zone capacities, honestly computed, is where the aggregate norm is either honoured or quietly reduced. A capacity is not a fact of nature. It is a judgement about how much space a pitch requires, how much passage must remain, what hours the vending runs and what the adjoining uses can bear, and each of those judgements can be made generously or narrowly. The Act’s discipline on the judgement is procedural rather than numerical: the capacity is determined on the recommendation of a Committee on which the vendors who will be rationed by it hold forty per cent of the seats, and the draw of lots in Section 4(3) governs only the case where identified vendors exceed even the capacity so determined, with the overflow entitled to accommodation in an adjoining zone rather than to exclusion. The reader assessing a town’s plan should therefore read the capacity figures as the plan’s real policy: the norm is the promise, the capacities are the performance, and a plan whose zones together hold a fraction of the vendors its own survey counted has failed the First Schedule’s first requirement in arithmetic, whatever its recitals say.

The First Schedule disciplines the plan at the points where a plan could otherwise be used to defeat the Act. The plan must ensure that all existing street vendors identified in the survey, subject to the norm of two and a half per cent of the population of the ward, zone, town or city, are accommodated. It must ensure the right of commuters to move freely and use the roads without impediment, a requirement stated in the same breath as the accommodation norm, so that the two obligations are reconciled inside the plan rather than one being traded against the other outside it. It must ensure that the provision of space for vending is reasonable and consistent with existing natural markets, and must take into account the civic facilities available for the use of the spaces identified. Its substantive contents run from spatial planning norms and the earmarking of vending space, through the determination of the three kinds of zone, to the consequential changes needed in the existing master plan, development plan, zonal plan and layout plan to accommodate vendors in the designated zones, which is the provision that carries street vending out of the municipal circular and into the city’s statutory land-use documents.

Can an existing market or a natural market be declared a no-vending zone?

No. The First Schedule lays down that any existing market, or a natural market identified under the survey, shall not be declared a no-vending zone, that a declaration must displace the minimum percentage of vendors, and that overcrowding or sanitary concerns alone do not justify a declaration unless the conditions stated there are met.

The remaining principles in that part of the Schedule complete the discipline. A declaration of a no-vending zone must be made in a manner which displaces the minimum percentage of street vendors; overcrowding of a place shall not be a basis for declaring it a no-vending zone, though restrictions may be placed on issuing certificates there to persons not identified in the survey; and sanitary concerns shall not be a basis unless they can be solely attributed to street vendors and cannot be resolved through appropriate civic action by the local authority. Each principle answers a standard justification for clearance and requires the authority to exhaust the lesser measure first: if the problem is crowding by uncertified sellers, restrict new certificates; if the problem is sanitation, the first question is what the municipality itself has failed to clean. The sequence table below gathers the whole statutory path in one place, because the Act’s meaning is in the order of its steps and in the protection that attaches at each of them.

Step in the statutory sequence	What the Act requires	The vendor’s protection at that step	Where the record shows the sequence stopping
Constitution of the Town Vending Committee	A Committee in each local authority under Section 22, with vendor members elected by vendors at not less than forty per cent	Vendors decide as members, not as petitioners	Committees unconstituted, or constituted with nominated vendors in place of elected ones
Survey of existing vendors	A survey of all existing vendors under Section 3(1), repeated at least once in every five years	Identification creates the record on which every later right depends	Surveys unbegun, partial, or confined to pockets of a city
Certificates issued to all vendors	A certificate to every vendor the survey identifies under Section 4	Section 3(3) bars eviction or relocation until this step is complete	Certificates issued to a fraction of those surveyed
Plan for street vending	A plan every five years under Section 21 and the First Schedule, accommodating vendors to the population norm	The plan must find room for the vendors who exist, including in natural markets	Plans unprepared, or prepared without the survey beneath them
Declaration of vending zones	Zones designated as restriction-free, restricted or no-vending on the Committee’s recommendation	No zone may be declared a no-vending zone before the survey and the plan exist	Older lists of prohibited streets treated as if they were zones under the Act
Relocation on thirty days notice	Notice of thirty days under Section 18(3), a new site under Section 13, physical eviction only after failure to vacate	Time, a destination, and a hearing structure around the move	Clearance by drive, without notice or destination
Seizure and return of goods	A signed list of goods seized under Section 19, release of perishables the same day and of other goods within two working days of the claim	The stock is documented and recoverable on a statutory timetable	Goods lifted without a list and returned, if at all, outside any timetable

Relocation, eviction and seized goods

Chapter IV is short, and every sentence in it is a limit on power. Section 18(1) empowers the local authority, on the recommendations of the Town Vending Committee, to declare a zone or part of it to be a no-vending zone for any public purpose and to relocate the street vendors vending in that area, in the manner the scheme specifies. The power is therefore real, but it is routed: it begins with a recommendation of the representative body, it requires a public purpose, and it is exercised under the scheme. Section 18(2) provides for the eviction of a vendor whose certificate has been cancelled under Section 10, and of a person who vends without a certificate. Section 18(3) then imposes the notice rule in unqualified terms: no street vendor shall be relocated or evicted by the local authority from the place specified in the certificate of vending unless he has been given thirty days notice for the same. Section 18(4) sequences the use of force: a vendor shall be relocated or evicted physically only after he has failed to vacate the place after the expiry of the notice period. Section 18(5) prices the default rather than criminalising it: a vendor who fails to relocate or vacate after the notice expires is liable to pay, for every day of default, a penalty which may extend up to two hundred and fifty rupees as determined by the local authority, but shall not be more than the value of the goods seized.

Section 19 governs the moment of highest practical friction, the seizure of goods. Seizure is available only where the vendor has failed to vacate after the notice period has lapsed, and the local authority seizes in addition to evicting, where it deems seizure necessary. Where a seizure is carried out, a list of the goods seized shall be prepared as the scheme specifies, and a copy, duly signed by the person authorised to seize the goods, shall be issued to the street vendor. The reclaim provision then fixes the timetable that the brief for this series rightly treats as one of the Act’s most concrete obligations: the vendor may reclaim the goods in the manner and on payment of the fees the scheme specifies, and the proviso directs that in the case of non-perishable goods the local authority shall release the goods within two working days of the claim being made, and in the case of perishable goods shall release them on the same day the claim is made. For a vendor whose entire capital is a day’s stock of vegetables or flowers, the difference between same-day release and release after a week is the difference between a penalty and a destruction of the business; the draftsman understood this, and wrote the perishable-goods rule at the speed of the goods themselves. The signed list, the fee and the two timetables together convert seizure from an act of confiscation into an act of documented custody, which is the form in which state power over poor people’s property has to be exercised if it is to be exercised lawfully at all.

The dispute machinery sits in Chapter V. Section 20 requires the appropriate Government to constitute one or more committees for the redressal of grievances and the resolution of disputes of street vendors, each consisting of a Chairperson who has been a civil judge or a judicial magistrate and two other professionals with prescribed experience, and it bars any employee of the appropriate Government or of the local authority from membership. A vendor with a grievance or dispute applies to the committee in writing; the committee verifies and enquires and takes steps for redressal within the prescribed time and manner; and an appeal from its decision lies to the local authority, which must hear the aggrieved person before disposing of it. The same committee decides the succession disputes that arise under Section 5(2) when a certificate holder dies or is disabled.

Who chairs the committee that decides a street vendor’s grievance?

The grievance committee under Section 20 is chaired by a person who has been a civil judge or a judicial magistrate, sitting with two other professionals of prescribed experience. No employee of the government or the local authority may be a member, so the vendor’s first forum is chaired by a judicial officer, not by the administration complained against.

The account given in this article states the general statutory position, and it is information rather than advice on an individual case: a vendor who has received a notice, or whose goods have been seized, should take advice on the facts promptly, because the periods this Act prescribes, thirty days for the notice and two working days for the release of goods, are short and unforgiving. The due process structure of notice, hearing and documented seizure is the same structure that Indian law has had to build, statute by statute, wherever the state deals with the homes and livelihoods of the urban poor, and its operation in the housing context is traced in the account of slum rehabilitation law in India. The urban local body that administers all of this is itself a creature of the constitutional scheme for municipalities examined in the pillar on the 74th Amendment and urban local bodies, which is why the Committee’s chair is the Municipal Commissioner and why the Act’s fortunes are tied so closely to the capacity of that tier of government.

The limits written into the Street Vendors Act 2014

A pillar article owes the reader the statute’s limits stated as plainly as its protections, and the Street Vendors Act contains its own answer to the charge that it privileges one class of street user over all others. Section 29 provides that nothing in the Act shall be construed as conferring upon a street vendor any temporary, permanent or perpetual right of carrying out vending activities in the vending zones allotted to him, or in respect of any place where he carries on vending. The certificate, that is, is not a title. It creates no ownership, no leasehold and no inheritable property in the pitch, and the exception the section itself preserves, for a stationary vendor on whom a leasehold or ownership right has been conferred under another law, confirms the rule by its narrowness. Section 12(1) grants the right to vend in accordance with the certificate’s terms, and Section 6 makes those terms specific: a zone, days, timings, conditions. A vendor who vends outside them is not exercising the Act’s right but breaking its conditions, and Section 27’s shield against interference extends only to the vendor who carries on vending in accordance with the certificate. The Act therefore confers no right to vend anywhere, in any manner, at any time. It confers a right to vend in the place and manner the lawful process has assigned, protected against removal except by that process. That is a smaller right than vendors’ rhetoric sometimes claims, and a larger one than municipal practice before 2014 conceded, and the statute is best understood as the settlement between those two positions.

The penalty chapter is correspondingly modest. Section 28 makes a vendor who vends without a certificate, who contravenes the terms of the certificate, or who contravenes the other conditions of the Act, the rules or the scheme, liable to a penalty for each offence which may extend up to two thousand rupees as determined by the local authority. Read with the daily penalty of up to two hundred and fifty rupees for failure to vacate after notice in Section 18(5), and with the hearing and appeal structure around cancellation in Sections 10 and 11, the enforcement philosophy is visible: the Act disciplines vendors through money penalties and through the certificate itself, not through imprisonment, confiscation or the destruction of stock. The discipline is real, and a vendor organisation advising its members has to say so: the certificate regime cuts both ways, and the vendor who takes its protection takes its duties, its fees, its hygiene obligations and its exposure to cancellation after hearing as part of the same settlement.

What remains is to state the two readings of the Act at full strength, because the statute is a negotiated peace between them and neither survives contact with the text in its crude form. The residents’ and pedestrians’ reading, in its strongest version, runs as follows. Public streets and footpaths are held for passage, and the pedestrian’s claim is not a preference but the primary purpose of the space. Unregulated vending displaces pedestrians onto carriageways, with the elderly, children and persons with disabilities bearing the risk first; it concentrates waste where food is sold; and it can annex the frontage of homes and shops without consent. On this reading the Act is not an eviction charter at all but a regulatory one: it creates no-vending zones, restricted zones, duties of cleanliness, penalties and a relocation power for public purposes, and the demand that zones be enforced is a demand that the statute be applied, not that it be defied. The vendors’ reading, also in its strongest version, answers at the level of sequence. The Constitution recognised the trade as a fundamental right in 1985 and 1989; Parliament in 2014 conditioned every act of removal on a survey, a certificate, a plan and a representative committee; and the complaint of the vendors is not against zones or regulation but against the order of operations, in which the authority proceeds directly to the last step, eviction, having performed none of the steps that alone make the last step lawful. A livelihood the Constitution protects, the argument runs, cannot be extinguished by an administrative act that the governing statute forbids the administrator to take. Both readings are right about the text they emphasise. The Act was designed to reconcile them in the plan and the Committee, the two institutions in which the competing claims are supposed to be traded off street by street, with the vendors present and the residents represented. Where those institutions do not exist, the reconciliation the Act designed cannot occur, and the conflict is settled instead by the relative force of a residents association’s complaint and a municipal squad’s timetable.

Two provisions point beyond regulation to the welfare purposes the Act’s title announces. Section 31 requires attention to promotional measures: the appropriate Government may, in consultation with the Town Vending Committee, the local authority, the planning authority and the street vendors associations or unions, take promotional measures for making available credit, insurance and other welfare schemes of social security for street vendors. Section 32 adds capacity building, research, education and training to advance knowledge of the informal sector and of street vendors in particular. Section 31 is the point at which this Act touches the wider architecture of welfare for unorganised workers that the social security code later consolidated, a connection traced in the pillar on the Social Security Code: the certificate was conceived not only as a permission but as the identity document through which a person otherwise invisible to the welfare state could be reached by credit and insurance. That conception becomes important in the implementation record, because it was through credit, six years later, that identification of vendors was pursued at a scale the survey machinery had not achieved.

The implementation record and the parallel door of credit

The Act’s first demand on every state was paper: rules within one year and a scheme within six months of commencement, under Sections 36 and 38. Its second demand was institutional: a Town Vending Committee in each local authority, composed as Section 22 requires. Its third was operational: the survey. The record of the years after 2014, as documented by the bodies that measured it, is a record of these demands being met late, partially, or in form rather than in substance. The Centre for Civil Society’s Street Vendors Act Compliance Index of 2017, built on applications under the Right to Information Act across the states, assessed states against the Act’s own requirements and found wide variation, with the framing of rules and schemes and the constitution of committees lagging the statutory deadlines in much of the country. Assessments by the National Association of Street Vendors of India, the federation that had campaigned for the statute, recorded the same pattern from the other side of the counter: surveys completed in a minority of cities, committees in many local authorities either not constituted or constituted without the statutory proportion of elected vendor members, and plans for street vending prepared in few cities. Research published by the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies on the Act’s implementation bottlenecks likewise identified the survey and the Committee as the points of failure, and recorded that eviction drives continued in places where no survey had been completed, notwithstanding the bar in Section 3(3). No responsible account asserts a single national figure for any of this, because the position varied by state and by city and the underlying counts were themselves among the things the missing surveys were supposed to supply. What can be said without a figure is the shape of the failure: it concentrated at the first steps of the sequence. The later steps of the Act, zones, allotment and noticed relocation, could not fail in the same way, because in most places they were never reached.

Parliament’s own later scrutiny supplies the closest thing to an official audit. A subsequent report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Urban Development on the implementation of the Act, summarised by PRS Legislative Research, recorded that of 4,315 towns in states which had notified a scheme under the Act, only 1,341, or thirty-one per cent, had framed the street vending plans Section 21 requires; that nine states had made no vending plans; that certain states had notified vending zones without formulating the plans that alone give zones their statutory basis, the precise inversion of the Act’s sequence; and that Grievance Redressal Committees under Section 20 had been constituted in only nine states. The same report noted cities being developed under urban missions and master plans without consideration of street vendors, and recommended the integration of the Act with those planning processes and the consultation of Town Vending Committees in them. These are figures with a stated base and a stated source, and they corroborate, from within the legislature, the pattern the independent assessments described: the scheme on paper in most states, the plan in a minority of towns, the grievance forum in a small number of states, and the sequence therefore unbegun in most of the places where vendors actually vend.

The courts continued to supervise, as they had before the statute, with the difference that they could point to a text; their post-2014 record is taken up in its own section below. What the litigation of these years exposes, beyond any individual order, is the condition of enforcement under a statute of this design. A vendor can invoke the bar in Section 3(3) only by litigating or by organised complaint, and the vendor with the least security is the least able to do either, which is why the Act placed its weight on the Committee and the social audit rather than on individual enforcement.

The credit scheme of 2020 changed the identification landscape without amending a section of the Act. PM SVANidhi, the Prime Minister Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi, launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs on 1 June 2020 during the disruption of the pandemic lockdowns, offered street vendors a collateral-free working capital loan of ten thousand rupees for one year, with an interest subsidy of seven per cent on timely repayment and incentives for digital transactions. Eligibility ran through the Act’s own documents: a vendor holding a certificate of vending or identity card, or identified in the survey though not yet issued a certificate, qualified directly. The structural novelty was the fourth category. Vendors left out of the survey, or who had begun vending after it, could obtain a Letter of Recommendation from the urban local body or the Town Vending Committee, and on the strength of that letter could borrow. The Letter of Recommendation module, launched in August 2020, was designed, in the Ministry’s own description, to reach vendors who did not have identity cards or certificates and were not in the surveyed list. A parallel door to recognition had been built beside the statutory one: lighter, faster, driven by the banking system and a loan target rather than by a committee, and conferring money rather than rights. The observation the pillar is required to make is precise about the difference. A Letter of Recommendation identifies a vendor for the purpose of credit. It is not a certificate of vending, it does not issue under Section 4, it allots no pitch, and it carries none of Section 3(3)’s protection against eviction. The scheme demonstrated all the same, at national scale and within months, that identifying vendors was administratively possible when an institution with reach wanted the list, which removed the most common explanation offered for the survey’s absence.

For the individual vendor, the practical conclusion the record supports is documentary. The protections of the Act attach to identified persons: the certificate itself, the survey acknowledgement, the identity card, any notice received, the signed list of any goods seized and photographs of the site and the stock are the record on which a grievance under Section 20, an appeal under Section 11 or a writ petition will stand or fall. Vendor organisations that maintain that record for their members, street by street, hold the strongest available answer to an unlawful clearance, because Section 3(3) is a bar that operates on facts, and the facts have to be provable by the person invoking them.

The scheme beneath the Act

A reader who stops at the thirty-nine sections will misunderstand how the Act actually governs, because Parliament deliberately left the operating detail to an instrument each appropriate Government had to create: the scheme for street vendors under Section 38, to be framed within six months of the commencement of the Act, after consultation with the local authority and the Town Vending Committee, covering the matters listed in the Second Schedule. The Second Schedule is, in effect, a table of contents for the real law of street vending in each state. It requires the scheme to settle the manner of conducting the survey and the principles for undertaking the full census and survey; the period within which certificates shall be issued to the vendors the survey identifies, and the form and manner of issuing them; the terms and conditions of issue, including for persons who wish to vend in the intervening period between two surveys; the form and manner of identity cards; the criteria for issuing certificates; the vending fees, which may differ by category and by city; the manner of collecting fees, maintenance charges and penalties, through banks and the counters of the local authority and the Committee; the period of validity of a certificate and the period, manner and fees of renewal; the manner of suspension and cancellation; the categories of vendors beyond stationary and mobile; the other categories of persons to whom preference is to be given; the public purpose for which a vendor may be relocated and the manner of relocating; the manner of evicting a vendor, of giving notice of eviction, and of physically evicting a vendor who has failed to leave; the manner of seizure of goods, including the preparation and issue of the list of goods seized, and the manner and fees of reclaiming them; the form and manner of the social audit of the Committee; the conditions under which private places may be designated as restriction-free, restricted or no-vending zones; the terms and conditions of vending, including norms for public health and hygiene; the designation of a State Nodal Officer for coordination at the state level; the manner of maintaining records by the Committee, the local authority, the planning authority and the Nodal Officer; the manner of vending on a time-sharing basis; and the principles for determining the three kinds of vending zone and the holding capacity of zones.

Two consequences follow from this design, and both run through the implementation record. The first is that the Act’s deadlines for its own machinery are deadlines about paper: the scheme within six months under Section 38, the rules within one year under Section 36, and a state that missed both, as many did, postponed every operative date in the statute without ever defying it in terms, since the survey itself is to be conducted within the period and in the manner the scheme specifies. The second is variation. Because fees, validity periods, criteria and procedures are scheme matters, the lived law of street vending under a single central Act differs from state to state and, through the bye-laws a local authority may make under Section 37, from town to town. The central Act fixes the rights, the sequence and the proportions; the scheme fixes the price of the certificate, its duration and the choreography of its issue. A vendor organisation reading its own state’s scheme against the Second Schedule, item by item, performs the most useful audit available of the distance between the Act Parliament passed and the law the state has made under it, and the audit requires no lawyer: the Schedule is a checklist, and every missing item is a question the Government was required to answer within six months of 1 May 2014.

Who counts as a street vendor

The definition in Section 2 repays attention because the survey can only find the people the definition describes. A street vendor is a person engaged in vending of articles, goods, wares, food items or merchandise of everyday use, or offering services to the general public, in a street, lane, sidewalk, footpath, pavement, public park or any other public place or private area, from a temporary built up structure or by moving from place to place. Three features of the drafting widen the gate. The first is the inclusion of services: the cobbler, the barber, the cycle repairer and the tea maker who sells a service with the goods are inside the Act, not merely the seller of merchandise. The second is the inclusion of private area: a vendor who sells from a privately owned forecourt or a market on private land is not outside the definition merely because the ground is private, though the First Schedule and the scheme then regulate which private places may be designated as vending zones. The third is the trio of included synonyms: hawker, peddler and squatter, together with all other synonymous terms, local or region specific. The squatter is the telling inclusion. Under the older municipal practice the word marked the person as a trespasser whose removal required no justification beyond the marking. Under the Act the same person is, by definition, a member of the class for whose protection the statute exists, entitled to be surveyed and, until the survey and certification are complete, protected by Section 3(3) from the removal the old vocabulary assumed.

The definition also has edges, and the honest pillar should mark them. The trade must be in articles of everyday use or services to the general public, which leaves the occasional seller of a single asset, and the person whose activity is a shop in substance conducted from a permanent structure, outside the centre of the definition. The vending must be from a temporary built up structure or on the move; permanence of structure is the boundary between the street vendor and the encroacher on the other side of the line, and disputes about whether a stall has become permanent are, in substance, disputes about which side of that boundary a livelihood falls on. The certificate provisions add the age floor: a certificate issues to a vendor who has completed fourteen years or such other age as the appropriate Government prescribes, a floor that reflects the uneasy junction between the reality of family vending, in which children work, and the law of child labour, which the Act does not displace. And one term the Act uses but never defines should be noticed, because rights turn on it: the family member who may vend in the certificate holder’s place under Section 5, and through whom the holder may carry on the business under the Section 5 undertaking, is nowhere defined in Section 2. Whether the family is the household, the dependants, or a wider circle is left to the scheme, the Committee and, on dispute, the committee under Section 20, which is a great deal of unexamined power to rest on an undefined word in a provision about who may work when the holder dies.

The survey in operation

Because everything depends on the survey, the manner of its conduct deserves the attention the Act’s critics and defenders both tend to skip in favour of its legal effect. The survey the Second Schedule contemplates is a full census and survey of existing vendors, and its product is not a headcount but a register of identified persons: the Town Vending Committee is required by Section 26(2) to maintain up to date records of registered street vendors and of the vendors to whom certificates have been issued, containing the name of the vendor, the stall allotted, the nature of the business carried on, the category of vending and such other particulars as are relevant. A proper survey therefore fixes, for each vendor, an identity, a location, a trade and a category, and it is the completeness of that record, and not the ceremony of having conducted an enumeration, that Section 3(3) makes the condition of lawful eviction. A survey that counted a market’s vendors without recording who they were would satisfy the word and defeat the Act.

The contested questions in any real survey are questions of inclusion. The vendor who was absent on the survey day, at a village for a family obligation or in hospital, presents the standing problem of enumeration among people whose lives do not keep office hours. The vendor who splits the day between two pitches, or who vends at a weekly market that assembles on one day in seven, tests the categories of stationary and mobile. The new arrival, drawn to the city by the same pressures that emptied the village, arrives after every survey and must wait for the route Section 4(2) provides through the Committee’s intervening certificates, measured against the holding capacity of zones that the existing vendors already fill. The Act’s answers to these cases are structural rather than generous: the five-yearly repetition of the survey, the intervening certificate route, the draw of lots where capacity is exceeded, and the grievance committee for disputes. What the Act does not provide is equally instructive. It prescribes no appeal for the person who says the survey missed or misrecorded them, distinct from the Section 11 appeal against decisions on certificates; the excluded person’s route is the intervening application and the grievance committee, both of which depend on the Committee whose survey is in question. The vendor’s charter that Section 26 requires the Committee to publish, specifying the time within which certificates shall be issued and renewed, is the transparency device meant to discipline this stage from outside, and a charter unpublished or unkept is among the earliest measurable signs that a town’s sequence has stalled at the first step.

The repetition of the survey every five years is not a bureaucratic rhythm but a recognition that the register decays. Vendors die, retire, migrate and change trades; pitches pass within families in ways the succession rule of Section 5(2) only partly captures; new settlements and new markets form at the edges of a growing city; and a register that was complete in its year becomes, within a few years, a document that protects some who have left and omits some who have arrived. The second survey is therefore a different exercise from the first. The first survey creates the protected class against a background of illegality; the second must revise a register that already carries rights, striking off the departed without stripping the mistakenly recorded, adding the intervening certificate holders of Section 4(2) whose names should already be in the Committee’s records, and recounting the population against which the two and a half per cent norm and the holding capacities were fixed. A town that treats the five-year survey as a fresh start, discarding the old register, destroys the continuity on which certificate holders have built their position; a town that treats the first register as permanent converts a snapshot into a closed guild from which every later arrival is excluded. The Act’s five-year cycle, matched to the five-year cycle of the plan, is the draftsman’s answer to both errors, and the towns that have run a second survey at all are few enough that the answer remains largely untested.

Fees, charges and the economics of the certificate

The Act’s financial provisions are brief, and their brevity conceals a design question that decides whether the certificate operates as recognition or as rent. Section 8 requires every vendor issued a certificate to pay such vending fees as the scheme specifies, and Section 17 requires the vendor to pay periodic maintenance charges for the civic amenities and facilities provided in the vending zones, as the local authority determines. The Second Schedule adds that the scheme is to prescribe the fees by category, differing between cities, and the manner of collecting fees, maintenance charges and penalties through banks and counters. The legitimate theory of these charges is the theory of the licence throughout regulatory law: a fee that funds the administration, the charter, the register and the audit, and maintenance charges that buy the water, lighting, drainage and cleaning of the vending zone, converting the vendor from an unauthorised occupant into a paying user of serviced space. The illegitimate possibility is written in the history of the subject: tehbazari and its cousins were also, in form, charges for the use of municipal ground, and they functioned in practice as a daily rent extracted without security in return. The difference between the two does not lie in the amount charged. It lies in what the payment buys and what happens on default. Under the Act, the fee buys a certificate that can be cancelled only after a hearing, carries a right to a new site on relocation, and grounds the Section 27 protection against interference; and default in payment is a breach of condition handled through that process, not a ground for the summary clearance that the old receipts never prevented. A scheme that sets fees at levels the trade cannot bear, or that treats the maintenance charge as general revenue while the zone goes uncleaned and unlit, reproduces the economics of the old regime inside the forms of the new one, and the social audit and the Committee’s vendor members are the instruments the Act supplies for saying so in a forum the authority must attend.

Why the sequence stalls

The pattern of the implementation record, in which failure concentrates at the first steps of the sequence, has causes that the pillar should state structurally rather than as a complaint about administrative will. The first cause is the one the series thesis names: the survey is an act of the duty-holder that diminishes the duty-holder’s freedom. A municipal administration that completes a survey and issues certificates converts a floating population it can clear at will into a register of rights holders it can move only by notice, for a public purpose, to a named site, and every subsequent clearance becomes slower, more visible and more litigable. Inaction, by contrast, costs the administration nothing that it can feel: the Section 3(3) bar binds only an authority that proposes to act lawfully, and the drive conducted in breach of it is challenged, if at all, after the goods are scattered. The second cause is capacity. A survey of every vendor in a large city, the constitution and election of a committee, the preparation of a plan that must be reconciled with the master plan, and the determination of holding capacities street by street are tasks of a scale that the municipal tier, whose chronic understaffing the local government articles in this series record across subjects, is least equipped to perform quickly. The third cause is political arithmetic. Vendors are numerous but dispersed and often migrant, with a vote that may be cast elsewhere or nowhere; residents associations are concentrated, organised and audible in the ward where the councillor lives. A clearance pleases the second constituency at once and disappoints the first at a distance, and the Committee, where vendors hold forty per cent of the seats, is the Act’s deliberate counterweight to that arithmetic, which is one reason its constitution is resisted in the particular form the Act prescribes, with elected rather than nominated vendor members.

The fourth cause is the one the credit scheme exposed. PM SVANidhi identified vendors through banks, urban local bodies and Letters of Recommendation at a pace the survey machinery never approached, because the identification was attached to something the identifying institutions wanted to distribute and the identified person wanted to receive. The survey, by contrast, distributes a right whose first visible effect, from the vendor’s side, may be a fee, a fixed pitch and a set of duties, and whose protective effect is invisible until the day a squad arrives. An identification exercise that offers protection later and obligations at once will always recruit more slowly than one that offers money at once, and the Act’s designers, who attached the certificate to welfare access in Section 31, understood the point in principle even though the welfare linkage was the part of the design least built. None of these causes requires bad faith in any individual official. Together they explain why a statute whose bar on eviction is absolute in terms has coexisted with evictions for a decade: the sequence that alone makes eviction lawful is long, expensive and politically unrewarding, and the statute’s only sanctions for not beginning it are the ones vendors must invoke themselves.

Three readers, three uses of the Act

For the vendor who receives a notice, or who finds a squad at the pitch, the Act supplies a short series of questions that decide the lawfulness of what is happening, and they should be asked in the Act’s own order. Has a survey of the town’s vendors been conducted under Section 3, and was the vendor’s name recorded in it? Have certificates of vending been issued to all street vendors, as Section 3(3) requires before any eviction or relocation? If the answer to either question is no, the removal is barred at the threshold, and the grievance committee under Section 20 and, beyond it, the High Court are the forums in which the bar is raised. If the sequence has been completed, the questions move to the relocation itself: is the move recommended by the Town Vending Committee and for a public purpose under Section 18(1); has thirty days notice been given under Section 18(3); and has a new site or area been determined, in consultation with the Committee, as Section 13 entitles the certificate holder to receive? At the seizure, the questions are documentary: was a signed list of the goods prepared and a copy issued, and has the claim for release been made, so that perishable goods fall due for release the same day and other goods within two working days? Each question corresponds to a sentence of the statute, and a removal that fails any of them is not a harsh exercise of a power but an act outside the power the Act confers.

For the municipal official, the Act is best read as the specification of a lawful clearance, and its discipline is an asset rather than only a constraint, because a relocation performed through the sequence is defensible in the forums where clearances are undone. The official’s order of work is the sequence itself: constitute the Committee with its elected vendor members, run the survey as a register and not a headcount, issue the certificates and publish the charter, prepare the plan with the planning authority and carry the consequential changes into the master plan, declare the zones, and only then relocate, on the Committee’s recommendation, for a stated public purpose, on thirty days notice, to a named site, with seizure documented and goods released on the statutory timetable. The official who follows it acquires something the old drives never produced, which is a record that survives challenge: the reasoned and notified decisions Section 23 requires, the social audit Section 26 requires, and the register Section 26(2) requires are the file on which a court, asked to restore a vendor or to stay a relocation, will decide. The official who skips the sequence and clears a street has performed the one act Section 3(3) forbids, and has done so, usually, to solve a problem of traffic or sanitation that the plan exists to solve lawfully and permanently.

For the residents association, the Act offers a route that is slower than the complaint to the councillor and stronger than it. The association’s interests are inside the machinery: resident welfare associations are a named constituency of the Town Vending Committee under Section 22, the plan must ensure that commuters can move freely under the First Schedule, and the duties of cleanliness and care of amenities in Sections 15 and 16 are obligations owed by every vendor, enforceable through the certificate’s conditions and, on breach after hearing, through cancellation. The association that organises around the machinery can press for the plan it wants: for the declaration of restricted zones with time-sharing where a footpath cannot carry both passage and vending all day, for the enforcement of the hygiene duties as conditions rather than as grievances, and for the statement of reasons that makes a Committee’s zoning choices contestable. What the Act denies the association is the outcome it most often seeks first, which is clearance without the sequence: a no-vending zone cannot lawfully be declared before the survey and the plan exist, an existing or natural market cannot be declared a no-vending zone at all, and overcrowding and sanitation, without more, are stated in the First Schedule not to be sufficient grounds. The residents’ strongest position under the statute is therefore not opposition to the sequence but insistence on it, carried on into the plan, where their claims have institutional weight and where the settlement the Act designs is actually struck.

The older municipal powers and the overriding effect

Section 33 gives the Act effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent contained in any other law for the time being in force, or in any instrument having effect by virtue of any law other than the Act. The provision is the statutory answer to a century of accumulated municipal text, and its operation deserves precision, because it neither repeals the municipal Acts nor leaves them untouched. What it displaces is inconsistency. A municipal power to license a trade continues, but a licence regime for street vending runs through the certificate and the Committee. A municipal power to remove obstructions from public places continues, but its exercise against a street vendor must follow the sequence of Sections 3, 18 and 19, and a removal that the Act forbids is not saved by being authorised under the older Act. A prosecution or penalty under a municipal bye-law for the act of vending itself must reckon with Section 27, which protects the vendor vending in accordance with the certificate against prevention by any authority exercising powers under any other law. The fields the Act does not enter remain governed by their own law, and the boundaries matter in practice. A vendor who sells food is subject, as any food business is, to the registration and hygiene requirements of the food safety law; the certificate of vending is not a food licence and does not pretend to be one. Traffic regulation as such, the law of public nuisance as such, and the criminal law are untouched, except where their use would defeat the Act’s specific protections, which is the territory Section 27 marks out. The practical discipline the overriding effect imposes is one of characterisation: before acting against a vendor, an authority must ask whether the act is, in substance, the regulation or removal of street vending, in which case the Act governs it, or the enforcement of a genuinely distinct obligation, in which case the other law governs and the Act is no obstacle. The drives of the old regime failed that question by never asking it; they treated every exercise of municipal power over a street as if the Act had not been passed, and it is that treatment, and not the existence of the powers, that Section 33 removes.

Weekly markets, festivals and the time-sharing city

The Act’s categories meet their hardest test in the temporal patterns of Indian vending, and a pillar that treats vending as a fixed stall in a fixed zone will misdescribe most of the trade it governs. The weekly market, the haat that assembles on a fixed day in a ground or along a street and dissolves by evening, is the oldest form of organised vending in the country, and the Act accommodates it through two of its concepts working together: the natural market, the place where sellers and buyers have traditionally congregated, which the First Schedule protects against declaration as a no-vending zone, and the restricted vending zone with time-sharing, under which space is allotted for defined periods and the vendor’s corresponding duty, under Section 14, is to remove goods and wares every day at the end of the time-sharing period. The mobile vendor is the second temporal form: the cart that works a round of streets and housing colonies on a rhythm its customers know, whose pitch is a route rather than a plot, and whose certificate records the category and the conditions rather than a single stall. Festival vending is the third: the surge of sellers around a fair, a procession route or a pilgrimage town in season, most of whom are vendors of the town’s ordinary markets working a second location, and some of whom arrive for the season alone. The Act has no festival chapter, and its machinery handles the surge, if at all, through the Committee’s power to certify intervening vendors under Section 4(2) and the scheme’s categories under Section 6, which may be specified beyond the stationary and the mobile. The honest conclusion is that the Act’s spatial imagination is stronger than its temporal one. Its zones, capacities and plans think in maps; the trade thinks in calendars as well, and the towns that have made the machinery work at all have generally done so by using the restricted zone and time-sharing with a suppleness the bare text permits but does not describe. The reader should hold the point as a limit of the statute rather than a failure of any town: a law that must govern both the permanent pitch outside a railway station and the flower seller who exists for one festival morning will fit one of them exactly and the other approximately.

The Town Vending Committee at work

Between the composition rules of Section 22 and the survey, plan and certificates that the Committee exists to produce stands the Committee’s own working life, which Sections 23 to 26 and 30 regulate in outline. The Committee meets at such times and places within the jurisdiction of the local authority, and observes such rules of procedure for the transaction of its business, and discharges such functions, as may be prescribed; its term and the manner of its constitution are matters for the rules of the appropriate Government under Section 22(1). The election of the vendor members is likewise a prescribed matter, referred to in Section 36 among the subjects of the rule-making power, and the quality of that election decides whether the forty per cent is a representation or a decoration: a vendor electorate defined by a survey that has not been held cannot elect, which is one of the circularities of the first cycle, in which the Committee is needed to conduct the survey and the survey is needed to constitute the Committee in its statutory form. Towns solved the circle in practice by constituting the first Committee on the best available lists and regularising representation as identification proceeded, a pragmatic answer the Act does not describe and does not forbid.

The transparency provisions have been noticed in passing and deserve their full weight here. Section 23(2) requires that every decision of the Committee shall be notified along with the reasons for taking it. Section 26 requires the vendor’s charter, the maintained database of vendors and certificates, and the social audit. Section 30 requires the Committee to furnish returns, from time to time, to the appropriate Government and the local authority as prescribed. Taken together these provisions describe a body that is meant to be legible from outside: its decisions public and reasoned, its register open to inspection in substance, its performance audited socially, and its reporting line running upward to the government that constituted it. The contrast with the licensing office of the old regime, whose decisions were oral, unreasoned and unrecorded, is the deepest institutional contrast the Act draws, deeper than the difference in outcomes in any individual case. A vendor who loses before the Committee has lost a decision that exists, can be read, and can be carried to the grievance committee, to the local authority in appeal and to a court; a vendor who lost before the licensing office had lost nothing that any forum could examine, because nothing had ever been recorded as decided. Reform of this kind does not announce itself in a single outcome. It announces itself in the existence of a file.

The courts after 2014

The litigation after the Act took the form the litigation before it had taken, with the statute substituted for the policy as the text under enforcement. In the continuing proceedings in the Supreme Court arising from the Mumbai hawking cases, and in the High Courts on petitions by vendors removed from particular markets and streets, the recurring judicial finding was of sequence failure: removals effected without a completed survey, committees unconstituted or constituted without the elected vendor representation Section 22 prescribes, and zones declared on the strength of lists that predated the Act. The orders that followed were correspondingly structural rather than compensatory, directing the constitution of committees, the conduct of surveys and the restraint of eviction in the meantime, and the Delhi High Court’s holding that a vendor removed in contravention of the Act must be restored, recorded in the litigation history maintained by the National Association of Street Vendors of India, states the remedial logic of Section 3(3) in its natural form: an eviction the statute forbade is undone, and the parties are returned to the point in the sequence the law had reached. Litigation by residents and traders ran in the other direction, seeking the clearance of particular streets and the enforcement of restrictions, and courts dealing with it had to hold the same text from the other side: the Act that forbids eviction without the sequence also creates the zones, duties and penalties whose enforcement residents sought, and the judicial answer in both directions was characteristically to direct the machinery to be completed rather than to distribute the street by judgment. The pattern carries a lesson about the kind of statute this is. The Act does not ask courts to decide where vending should happen; it builds a body and a process to decide that, street by street, and confines the courts to their constitutional role of requiring the process to exist and to be followed. Where judges have been drawn further in, it has been because the process did not exist to be followed, and the supervision that results is best understood as the court holding the ring for a committee the executive has not yet convened.

What the Street Vendors Act 2014 does not do

The limits of a statute are part of its meaning, and this Act’s silences are as instructive as its provisions. It fixes no date by which the first survey must be completed. Section 3(1) leaves the period and manner of the survey to the scheme, and the scheme was due within six months, but no provision of the Act says that a town which has not surveyed its vendors by a stated year is in default of a dated obligation, or attaches any consequence to the omission beyond the continuing bar on eviction that the omission itself sustains. The removal of difficulties power in Section 39 expired three years after commencement, and the power to amend the Schedules in Section 35 has not been used to supply the omission. The Act likewise appropriates no money and creates no fund: the cost of surveys, committees, charters, audits and serviced vending zones falls on local authorities whose finances are the weakest in the federal structure, and the promotional measures of Section 31 are framed as what the appropriate Government may take, not what it shall fund. The Act creates no compensation for the vendor lawfully relocated beyond the entitlement to a new site under Section 13, and no protection of livelihood for the vendor whom a completed sequence, honestly administered, leaves outside the holding capacity of every zone, beyond the draw of lots and accommodation in an adjoining zone under Section 4(3). It does not touch the ownership of the land vended on, and Section 29 is emphatic that it confers none of the rights of ownership. It does not organise vendors, though its elections presume their associations, and it does not regulate the wholesale markets and supply chains on which the retail trade depends. Its remedial ladder is also shorter than it first appears. The appeal against the Committee’s certificate decisions under Section 11, and the appeal against the grievance committee’s decision under Section 20, both terminate at the local authority, which is the institution whose own officers conduct the surveys, effect the seizures and execute the relocations that generate the disputes. The Act creates no appellate tribunal above the municipality and no compensation for the vendor whose goods are damaged or whose stock perishes in a seizure later found unlawful; beyond the local authority, the vendor’s remedy is the constitutional one of a writ petition to the High Court, with the cost and delay that route carries for a person whose capital is a cart and a day’s stock. The design choice is consistent with the Act’s general method, which builds forums close to the street and trusts record, representation and audit to discipline them, but its consequence should be recorded without varnish: the first three rungs of the ladder are inside or beside the institution complained against, and the fourth is a constitutional court. A reader who knows what the Act omits will not ask it for what it cannot give, and will direct the argument about survey deadlines, municipal finance and compensation to the legislatures and governments that alone can supply them, which is where, on the Act’s own design, those arguments belong.

The certificate as an identity

One function of the certificate of vending is easy to miss because the Act never names it, and it may in the long run be the function that matters most. For a large part of the urban workforce, the certificate and the identity card issued with it under Section 6(3) are the first documents in which the state records the holder’s occupation as a fact about them, in a register maintained under Section 26(2) with the stall, the trade and the category entered against a name. The older documents of the trade, the licence and the tehbazari receipt, recorded a payment. The certificate records a person. That difference is what Section 31 builds on when it directs promotional measures for making available credit, insurance and other welfare schemes of social security in consultation with the Committee and the vendors associations: a welfare state cannot deliver a pension, an insurance enrolment or a loan to a person its registers do not contain, and the survey and certificate are, among their other purposes, the enrolment machinery of the informal workforce in the one trade where Parliament has built it in full. PM SVANidhi’s design acknowledged the same logic from the banking side, taking the certificate and identity card as its first route to the borrower and improvising the Letter of Recommendation only for the vendors the registers had missed. The two instruments measure the same gap from opposite ends: the Act promises that identification shall carry rights, the scheme demonstrated that identification can be carried out at speed when it carries money, and the distance between the registers as they stand and the workforce as it is remains the distance between the statute’s design and its decade. It is not an accident that Section 22 names banks among the interests to be represented on the Town Vending Committee. The draftsman placed the lender inside the room where identification is decided, years before any credit scheme existed to use the list, because the certificate was conceived from the beginning as a document a bank could lend against the holder of: proof of a trade, a place and a lawful right to be there. The identity card in the vendor’s pocket is, on that conception, the smallest unit of the formal economy, and the history of the decade is the history of how long it took the rest of the state to begin reading it.

The numbers inside the Act

A statute of this kind can be audited through its own figures, and gathering them in one place is a check on everything claimed for it in this article. The Act has thirty-nine sections, ten chapters and two Schedules. Its cycles run in fives: a survey at least once in every five years under Section 3(1), and a plan once in every five years under Section 21. Its single proportion of space is two and a half per cent, the population norm for accommodating identified vendors, stated in Section 3(2) and repeated in the First Schedule. Its age floor for a certificate is fourteen years under Section 4(1). Its proportions of representation are forty per cent of the Town Vending Committee for street vendors, elected by the vendors, not less than ten per cent for non-governmental and community based organisations, and one third of the vendor members for women vendors, all under Section 22. Its periods of protection are thirty days of notice before relocation or eviction under Section 18(3), release of perishable goods on the same day the claim is made and of non-perishable goods within two working days under Section 19. Its money figures are a penalty of up to two hundred and fifty rupees for every day of default in vacating after notice under Section 18(5), capped at the value of the goods seized, and a penalty of up to two thousand rupees for each offence under Section 28. Its deadlines for its own machinery are a scheme within six months of commencement under Section 38 and rules within one year under Section 36, with the removal of difficulties power expiring three years after commencement under Section 39. Read as a set, the numbers describe the statute’s temperament: long cycles for planning, short periods for the protection of the person and the goods, small penalties, large representative proportions, and deadlines that bind governments about paper more firmly than about the survey itself, which is the one operation for which the Act, as the preceding section noted, fixes no date at all.

Delhi and Mumbai: the two laboratories

The Act operates nationally, but its meaning was worked out first in the two cities whose litigation had produced it, and each shows a different face of the sequence. Delhi is the city of the scheme: from Sodan Singh in 1989 through the committees and reports that followed, to Gainda Ram in 2010, the capital’s vendors lived under court-supervised arrangements for a quarter of a century before the statute, and the Act’s task in Delhi was to convert a judicially administered scheme into a statutory one, with Town Vending Committees for the municipal bodies of the capital constituted under the Act and the rules framed for Delhi in 2017. The conversion mattered because a scheme administered under a court’s eye depends on the litigation continuing, while a committee under a statute exists whether or not any petition is pending; it mattered also because the capital’s experience demonstrated the limit of conversion, since committees constituted without the survey beneath them inherited the old lists and the old disputes in a new form. Mumbai is the city of the zone: from the hawking and non-hawking zones of the 1985 decision through the framework the Supreme Court approved for Greater Mumbai in 2004, with its conditions for pitches and its eligibility cut-offs, the question in Mumbai was always which streets and which vendors, and the Act’s task there was to subject an existing geography of permission and prohibition to the discipline of the survey, the plan and the First Schedule’s principles, including the rule that an existing or natural market cannot be declared a no-vending zone. The two cities frame the national position. Where the Act has been used as it was drafted, it is because a litigation history had already taught the parties the vocabulary of schemes and zones and the Act arrived as a text to argue with. Where no such history existed, the Act arrived as an instruction to institutions that had never performed any of its steps, and the record of the first decade is largely the record of that difference.

A central Act on municipal rails

The constitutional oddity recorded at the passage stage, that Parliament legislated on street vending through the Concurrent List entries on economic and social planning, social security and the welfare of labour, determines the Act’s administrative shape, and a reader who grasps the shape will predict the implementation record without surprise. The Act commands, but it commands through the tier of government the Constitution assigns to another list: the local authority that surveys, certifies, plans and relocates is a municipal body functioning under state municipal law, staffed by the state and funded, in the main, by the state and its own narrow revenues. The Centre’s instrument is therefore necessarily one of structured instruction: it prescribes the committee’s composition because it cannot appoint the committee, prescribes the plan’s contents because it cannot draw the plan, and prescribes the sequence because the acts in the sequence are performed by others. Even the definition of the appropriate Government, the authority that frames the scheme and the rules, is layered: the Central Government for Union territories without a legislature, the governments of the National Capital Territory of Delhi and of Puducherry for those territories, and the State Government elsewhere. The Act’s geography has two further edges that its text marks plainly. As enacted, it extended to the whole of India except the State of Jammu and Kashmir, an exclusion carried in Section 1(2) in the manner of central Acts of its period. And by Section 1(4) its provisions do not apply to any land, premises and trains owned and controlled by the Railways under the Railways Act, 1989. The railway exclusion is the more consequential of the two in the life of the trade, because the approaches to railway stations are among the densest vending grounds in Indian cities, a fact the 1985 hawking decision recognised when it treated the neighbourhood of stations as a place where the competing claims were strongest. The Standing Committee that examined the Bill recorded the exclusion and recommended that the position of vendors on railway land be addressed; the enacted Act retained the carve-out. The result is a boundary that a vendor crosses without knowing it: the certificate, the survey and Section 3(3) govern the municipal street up to the edge of railway land, and at the boundary a different legal regime begins, administered by a different authority, in which the vendor’s statutory sequence has no purchase. No account of the Act’s coverage is honest that does not mark that boundary, and no vendor’s organisation can plan a market’s defence without knowing on which side of it each pitch stands.

Harassment and the economics of the pitch

Section 27, the prevention of harassment provision, addresses the layer of the old regime that never appeared in any statute: the informal toll. In the equilibrium that preceded the Act, the pitch of a vendor in a busy market carried a price that was paid not only, and often not mainly, to the municipality. Payments to secure a place, to be warned of a drive, to recover seized goods and simply to be left alone were the ordinary operating cost of the trade, extracted by whoever locally held the power to disturb it, and they fell with perfect regressivity: the smaller the vendor’s capital, the larger the share of it the toll consumed. The Act attacks that economy at its root rather than at its transactions, and the design is worth seeing clearly. A toll can be extracted only where the payer’s position is precarious and undocumented, where removal is a constant possibility and no record exists against which a demand can be tested. Identification, certification, the published charter with its time limits, the reasoned and notified decisions of a committee on which vendors sit, the signed list for seized goods and the two working day and same day release rules are each, in this light, anti-extortion devices: they convert discretion into record, and record is the one currency the informal toll cannot easily be paid in. Section 27 then adds the legal edge, providing that a vendor carrying on vending in accordance with the certificate’s terms shall not be prevented from exercising the rights it confers by any person, or by the police, or by any other authority acting under any other law. The provision’s limits are the limits of its condition. It protects the compliant vendor, vending where and as the certificate allows; the vendor outside the certificate’s terms, in a no-vending zone or beyond the allotted time, is remitted to the Act’s own discipline. And its remedy is the machinery of the Act, the grievance committee and the appeal, rather than a freestanding offence of harassing a vendor, which the Act does not create: there is no penalty in Section 28, or anywhere in the Act, for the official who demands the toll. The pillar’s assessment is therefore measured. The Act does not criminalise the harassment it names a chapter after. It builds the documentary world in which harassment becomes harder to practise and easier to prove, and leaves the proof to be used in the forums it creates. Whether that is enough is an empirical question the social audit was designed to answer town by town; that the audit itself is among the least performed of the Committee’s duties is the implementation record in miniature.

Verdict

The Street Vendors Act 2014 is the cleanest example in this series of a right made conditional on an administrative act controlled by the very authority the right restrains. Its central sentence is unconditional: no eviction or relocation until the survey is complete and certificates have been issued to all. Its central weakness is the mirror image of that strength: the authority that wishes to evict is the authority whose committee must first conduct the survey, issue the certificates and prepare the plan, and an authority that does nothing has, on the face of the Act, disabled itself from lawful eviction while remaining entirely capable of unlawful eviction, against which the vendor’s remedy is the slow one of grievance, appeal and writ. The Act should therefore be read neither as the charter of impunity its critics describe nor as the accomplished liberation its preamble promises. It is a sequence, stated with unusual precision, and its measure in any city is a single factual question: has the sequence been begun? Where the Committee sits with its elected forty per cent, the survey is done, the certificates are out and the plan exists, the Act delivers a regulated settlement in which vendors hold a real and limited right, residents hold real and enforceable protections, and removal is a governed act with notice, a destination and a timetable for the return of goods. Where the sequence has not been begun, the eviction that happens anyway is not the Act failing to be generous. It is the Act being disobeyed, and the first step toward its enforcement is not a new law but the performance, at last, of Section 3.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What rights does the Street Vendors Act give?

The Act gives a street vendor a connected set of rights built around identification. A vendor identified in the survey has the right to be issued a certificate of vending under Section 4, and to carry on vending in accordance with the certificate’s terms under Section 12, in the zone and at the timings the certificate records. Until the survey is complete and certificates are issued to all vendors, the vendor has the right under Section 3(3) not to be evicted or relocated at all. On a lawful relocation, the certificate holder has the right to a new site or area under Section 13, to thirty days notice under Section 18, to a signed list of any goods seized and their release on the timetable Section 19 fixes, and to pursue a grievance before the committee under Section 20 and appeals under Sections 11 and 20. Section 27 adds the right of a compliant vendor not to be prevented from vending by the police or any other authority acting under another law.

Q: What is a certificate of vending and who issues it?

A certificate of vending is the document that records a street vendor’s lawful right to vend under the Street Vendors Act 2014. It is issued by the Town Vending Committee under Section 4 to every street vendor identified in the survey who has completed fourteen years of age or the age the appropriate Government prescribes, and it may also be granted between surveys under Section 4(2). Under Section 6 it is issued in the categories of stationary vendor, mobile vendor or another category the scheme specifies, and it records the vending zone, the days and timings of vending and the conditions and restrictions that apply, with an identity card issued to the holder. Before issue, the vendor gives the undertaking Section 5 requires: to vend personally or through a family member, to have no other means of livelihood, and not to transfer the certificate or the place in any manner, including by rent.

Q: Can a vendor be evicted before the survey is done?

No. Section 3(3) of the Act provides that no street vendor shall be evicted or, as the case may be, relocated till the survey specified under Section 3(1) has been completed and the certificate of vending is issued to all street vendors. The bar is unqualified and it binds every local authority: until both conditions are satisfied, the power to evict or relocate a street vendor has not arisen, whatever the position under older municipal law, and Section 33 gives the Act overriding effect over inconsistent laws. The First Schedule adds that until the survey has been carried out and the plan for street vending formulated, no zone may be declared a no-vending zone either. Courts enforcing the Act have treated removals carried out in breach of the bar as unlawful, and the Delhi High Court has held that a vendor removed in contravention of the Act must be restored.

Q: What is a Town Vending Committee and who sits on it?

A Town Vending Committee is the body the Act places at the centre of street vending regulation in each local authority: it conducts the survey, issues certificates of vending, recommends the vending zones and the plan, and its recommendation is required before a zone is declared a no-vending zone and vendors relocated. Section 22 prescribes its composition. The Municipal Commissioner or Chief Executive Officer chairs it. Other members are nominated to represent the local authority, its medical officer, the planning authority, the traffic police, the police, associations of street vendors, market and traders associations, non-governmental and community based organisations, resident welfare associations, banks and other interests. Members representing non-governmental and community based organisations must be at least ten per cent. Members representing street vendors must be at least forty per cent of the total and are elected by the street vendors themselves; one third of the vendor members must be women vendors, with due representation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, minorities and persons with disabilities among them.

Q: What are vending zones and no vending zones?

A vending zone is an area designated by the local authority, on the recommendation of the Town Vending Committee, for the specific use of street vendors, as Section 2 defines it. The plan for street vending sorts the city’s spaces into three kinds: restriction-free-vending zones, where vending proceeds without special restriction; restricted vending zones, where it proceeds subject to restrictions such as time-sharing; and no-vending zones, where vending is barred and where, under Section 12(2), no vendor may carry on vending activities. The declaration of zones is disciplined by the First Schedule. The plan must accommodate the vendors identified in the survey to the norm of two and a half per cent of the population; an existing market or a natural market may not be declared a no-vending zone; a declaration must displace the minimum percentage of vendors; overcrowding and sanitary concerns are not, without more, sufficient grounds; and until the survey is carried out and the plan formulated, no zone may be declared a no-vending zone at all.

Q: What notice is required before relocating a vendor?

Section 18(3) requires thirty days notice. It provides that no street vendor shall be relocated or evicted by the local authority from the place specified in the certificate of vending unless he has been given thirty days notice for the same, in the manner the scheme specifies. The notice sits inside a sequence: relocation follows the declaration of a no-vending zone for a public purpose on the recommendation of the Town Vending Committee under Section 18(1), the certificate holder is entitled to a new site or area under Section 13, and physical eviction under Section 18(4) is permitted only after the vendor has failed to vacate after the notice period has expired. A vendor who still fails to vacate is liable, for every day of default, to a penalty of up to two hundred and fifty rupees determined by the local authority, capped at the value of the goods seized, under Section 18(5).

Q: What happens to goods seized from a vendor?

Goods may be seized under Section 19 only in a defined situation: the vendor has failed to vacate the place specified in the certificate after the notice period under Section 18(3) has lapsed, and the local authority, in addition to evicting the vendor, deems seizure necessary. Where goods are seized, a list of the goods must be prepared as the scheme specifies, and a copy, duly signed by the person authorised to seize the goods, must be issued to the street vendor. The vendor may reclaim the goods in the manner and on payment of the fees the scheme specifies, and the proviso to Section 19(2) fixes the release timetable: for non-perishable goods the local authority shall release the goods within two working days of the claim being made, and for perishable goods it shall release them on the same day the claim is made.

Q: Why is the Street Vendors Act poorly implemented?

The assessments that have measured the Act against its own sequence give a consistent answer: the failure concentrates at the first steps, which are the steps the duty-holding authority must perform against its own convenience. The Centre for Civil Society’s Street Vendors Act Compliance Index of 2017, built on Right to Information applications across the states, found rules, schemes and committees lagging the Act’s deadlines in much of the country. A later report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Urban Development on implementation, summarised by PRS Legislative Research, recorded that only 1,341 of 4,315 towns in states that had notified a scheme had framed street vending plans, and that Grievance Redressal Committees existed in only nine states. The National Association of Street Vendors of India recorded surveys completed in a minority of cities and committees constituted without the elected vendor proportion Section 22 requires. A completed survey converts vendors into rights holders and disables summary eviction; an unbegun survey costs the authority nothing it can feel, and that asymmetry, with municipal capacity and political arithmetic, explains the record.

Q: How often must the survey of street vendors be carried out?

Section 3(1) requires a survey of all existing street vendors within the Town Vending Committee’s jurisdiction, conducted within the period and in the manner the scheme specifies, and provides that a subsequent survey shall be carried out at least once in every five years. The five-year cycle matches the cycle of the plan for street vending under Section 21, so that each plan is built on a refreshed count of the vendors it must accommodate. The register a survey produces is maintained under Section 26(2), which requires the Committee to keep up to date records of registered vendors and certificate holders, with the stall allotted, the nature of business and the category of vending recorded. Between surveys, the trade is not frozen: Section 4(2) allows the Committee to grant certificates to persons who seek to vend in the intervening period, subject to the scheme, the plan and the holding capacity of the zones.

Q: What is the difference between a stationary vendor and a mobile vendor?

The distinction is drawn in Section 2 and carried into the categories of certificate under Section 6. A stationary vendor carries out vending activities on a regular basis at a specific location: the stall outside the station, the pitch in the market, the cart that returns each day to the same corner. A mobile vendor carries out vending activities by moving from place to place, vending goods and services along a round of streets and neighbourhoods rather than from a fixed spot. Section 6 provides that the certificate of vending shall be issued in the categories of a stationary vendor, a mobile vendor, or any other category the scheme specifies, and that the certificate records the vending zone, the days and timings and the conditions of vending. The distinction matters practically because the machinery of the Act is spatial: zones, holding capacities and time-sharing apply differently to a vendor whose place is a plot and a vendor whose place is a route.

Q: Can a person who starts vending between two surveys get a certificate of vending?

Yes. Section 4(2) provides that where, in the intervening period between two surveys, any person seeks to vend, the Town Vending Committee may grant a certificate of vending to such person, subject to the scheme, the plan for street vending and the holding capacity of the vending zones. The new entrant is therefore not required to wait up to five years for the next survey before vending lawfully. The grant is discretionary in form, expressed as a power the Committee may exercise, and it is measured against the plan and the capacity of the zones rather than against the survey list, which the entrant by definition is not on. The same route is the practical answer for a vendor whom a survey missed. Where the number of persons seeking certificates exceeds the holding capacity of a zone, Section 4(3) requires a draw of lots for that zone, with the remaining persons accommodated in an adjoining vending zone to avoid relocation.

Q: What happens if more vendors seek certificates than a vending zone can hold?

Section 4(3) answers the case directly. Where the number of street vendors identified in the survey, or the number of persons seeking to vend between surveys, is more than the holding capacity of the vending zone and exceeds the number of persons to be accommodated there, the Town Vending Committee shall carry out a draw of lots for issuing the certificates of vending for that vending zone, and the remaining persons shall be accommodated in an adjoining vending zone to avoid relocation. Two features of the provision deserve notice. The allocation is by lot, not by price, queue or official choice, which removes the discretion through which pitches were historically sold. And the consequence of losing the draw is not exclusion from lawful vending but accommodation in an adjoining zone: the statute treats scarcity as a problem of placement within the system, to be solved by the plan and the capacities, rather than as a ground for returning the unsuccessful vendor to illegality.

Q: Can a certificate of vending be cancelled without hearing the vendor?

No. Section 10 empowers the Town Vending Committee to cancel or suspend a certificate where the vendor has breached its conditions or the terms of the Act, the rules or the scheme, or where the certificate was secured by misrepresentation or fraud, and it does so without prejudice to any fine the vendor may have incurred. The proviso then states the procedural condition in mandatory terms: no such cancellation or suspension shall be made by the Town Vending Committee unless an opportunity of hearing has been given to the street vendor. A cancellation ordered without a hearing is therefore outside the power the section confers, and the vendor additionally holds the appeal Section 11 provides to the local authority against decisions on the issue, cancellation or suspension of a certificate, which the local authority likewise may not dispose of without hearing the appellant. The certificate, once issued, is a legal position that can be removed only through process, not a permission revocable at will.

Q: Where can a vendor appeal against a Town Vending Committee decision?

Section 11 gives the appeal to the local authority. Any person aggrieved by a decision of the Town Vending Committee on the issue of a certificate of vending under Section 6, or on its cancellation or suspension under Section 10, may prefer an appeal to the local authority in the form, within the period and in the manner prescribed, and the local authority may not dispose of the appeal unless the appellant has been given an opportunity of hearing. A distinct route exists for grievances and disputes generally: under Section 20 the vendor applies to the Grievance Redressal Committee chaired by a person who has been a civil judge or a judicial magistrate, and an appeal from that committee’s decision also lies to the local authority, again with a hearing. The Act builds no appellate forum above the local authority, so beyond it the vendor’s remedy is a writ petition to the High Court.

Q: What duties does the Street Vendors Act place on vendors themselves?

The Act’s rights are matched by duties in Sections 14 to 17, owed by every vendor as part of the certificate settlement. Under Section 14, a vendor who occupies space on a time-sharing basis must remove his goods and wares every day at the end of the time-sharing period allowed. Under Section 15, every vendor must maintain cleanliness and public hygiene in the vending zones and the adjoining areas. Under Section 16, every vendor must maintain civic amenities and public property in the vending zone in good condition and not damage or destroy them. Under Section 17, every vendor must pay the periodic maintenance charges the local authority determines for the civic amenities and facilities provided in the zones, and Section 8 adds the vending fees the scheme specifies. The duties are enforceable through the certificate itself: breach of the conditions of vending is a ground for cancellation or suspension after a hearing under Section 10, and a contravention carries the penalty Section 28 prescribes.

Q: Does the Street Vendors Act apply to railway land?

No. Section 1(4) provides that the provisions of the Act shall not apply to any land, premises and trains owned and controlled by the Railways under the Railways Act, 1989. The carve-out has practical weight because the approaches to railway stations are among the densest vending grounds in Indian cities, and a vendor’s pitch can stand on the boundary between the municipal street, where the survey, the certificate and the bar on eviction in Section 3(3) govern, and railway land, where a different authority and a different legal regime begin. The exclusion was recorded when the Bill was examined by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, which recommended that the position of vendors on railway land be addressed, and the enacted Act retained it. A vendor organisation mapping a market’s legal position therefore has to establish, pitch by pitch, on which side of the boundary each vendor stands.

Q: What penalty can a vendor face for vending without a certificate of vending?

Section 28 sets the penalty for the Act’s own contraventions. If a street vendor indulges in vending activities without a certificate of vending, contravenes the terms of the certificate, or contravenes any other terms and conditions specified for regulating street vending under the Act or the rules or schemes made under it, the vendor is liable to a penalty for each such offence which may extend up to two thousand rupees, as determined by the local authority. A distinct penalty applies at the relocation stage: under Section 18(5), a vendor who fails to relocate or vacate the place specified in the certificate after the period in the thirty days notice has expired is liable to pay, for every day of default, a penalty of up to two hundred and fifty rupees as determined by the local authority, but not more than the value of the goods seized. The Act prescribes no imprisonment for vending offences.

Q: Does a certificate of vending give ownership of the vending place?

No. Section 29 provides that nothing in the Act shall be construed as conferring upon a street vendor any temporary, permanent or perpetual right of carrying out vending activities in the vending zones allotted to him, or in respect of any place on which he carries on such vending activity. The certificate confers a right to vend in accordance with its terms, protected by Section 3(3) before certification is complete, by the notice and new site provisions on relocation, and by Section 27 against interference by other authorities, but it is not a title, a lease or a property in the pitch, and Section 5 bars its transfer in any manner, including by rent. Section 29 preserves one exception: it does not disturb a stationary vendor on whom a temporary leasehold or ownership right has been conferred by a lease deed or otherwise under another law for the place at the specific location where the vending is carried on.

Q: What is the street vendor’s charter that the Town Vending Committee must publish?

The street vendor’s charter is the public statement of service standards that Section 26(1) requires every Town Vending Committee to publish. The charter must specify the time within which the certificate of vending shall be issued to a street vendor, the time within which the certificate shall be renewed, and the other activities to be performed within the time limits specified in it. Section 26 couples the charter with two further transparency duties: the Committee must maintain up to date records of registered street vendors and of vendors to whom certificates have been issued, recording the name, the stall allotted, the nature of business and the category of vending, and it must carry out a social audit of its activities under the Act, the rules and the schemes. The charter converts the scheme’s internal periods into a promise made to the public, against which an individual vendor’s delay, and a committee’s general performance, can be measured and raised in the grievance machinery.

Q: Is a PM SVANidhi loan the same as a certificate of vending?

No, and the difference decides what protection the vendor holds. A certificate of vending is issued by the Town Vending Committee under Section 4 of the Street Vendors Act 2014, on the strength of the survey or an intervening application, and it carries the Act’s rights: to vend on the certificate’s terms, to thirty days notice and a new site on relocation, and to the Section 27 protection against interference. PM SVANidhi, the micro-credit scheme the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs launched on 1 June 2020, gives an eligible vendor a collateral-free working capital loan of ten thousand rupees for one year, with an interest subsidy on timely repayment. Its identification routes run through the Act’s documents, a certificate, an identity card or a place in the survey, and, for vendors outside them, through a Letter of Recommendation from the urban local body or the Committee. The Letter of Recommendation identifies the vendor for credit. It is not a certificate, allots no pitch and confers no protection against eviction.