Protecting Livelihoods: The National Policy for Urban Street Vendors

Every Indian city runs partly on the labour of people who have no shop, no lease, and no formal business registration. They set up on pavements, outside railway stations, near temples, and along market lanes, selling tea, vegetables, clothes, and repaired mobile covers. For most of independent India’s history, the law treated these workers as a nuisance to be cleared rather than as entrepreneurs to be supported. The National Policy for Urban Street Vendors, 2004 was the first serious attempt by the Indian government to change that framing and give street vending a legitimate place in the urban economy.

The invisible backbone of urban markets 🔗

Street vendors are not a marginal group. Estimates from vendor associations put their number at close to 10 million nationally, with individual cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi each home to over two lakh vendors. They are also a large part of a much bigger picture: a majority of India’s urban workforce operates outside formal contracts, and street vending is one of the most visible faces of this informal urban economy.

Vending is often the first rung on the economic ladder for migrants and the urban poor. It needs little capital to start, offers flexible hours, and puts affordable goods and services within reach of ordinary city residents. Yet, until 2004, no national framework acknowledged this contribution or protected the people behind it.

Life before the policy: struggles vendors faced 🔗

Before the policy came into being, street vendors operated in a legal grey zone that made everyday work precarious.

No legal recognition 🔗

Municipal laws across most Indian cities did not recognise vending as a legitimate occupation. Licences, where they existed, were capped in number and rarely updated to match a growing urban population. This left the vast majority of vendors unlicensed by default, regardless of how long they had been trading in the same spot.

Constant threat of eviction 🔗

Without recognition, vendors had no standing to resist removal. Municipal staff and police could clear a market at short notice, confiscate goods, or demand bribes to look away. Vendor groups have long pointed out that harassment stemmed directly from this absence of official recognition, combined with vendors’ limited political and economic bargaining power.

Missing from urban planning 🔗

City master plans rarely set aside space for vending. Roads, footpaths, and public squares were designed as if vendors did not exist, even though they had operated in many of the same locations for generations. This meant any presence on public land was, by definition, an encroachment, no matter how organically the market had grown.

What the National policy for urban street vendors, 2004 promised 🔗

The policy was formulated by the Government of India on 20 January 2004, marking the country as one of the very few in the world to adopt a dedicated national framework for street vendors. Its stated aim was to create a supportive environment for vendors to earn a livelihood while addressing genuine concerns around congestion and hygiene in public spaces. Several provisions stood out.

Recognising vending as a legitimate livelihood 🔗

The policy framed street vending as an important part of the urban economy rather than as a public order problem. This was a significant shift in official thinking. According to the government’s own summary of the policy, it was conceived as a major initiative for urban poverty alleviation through support to dignified livelihoods, not merely as a tool for street management.

Planning vending zones instead of banning vendors 🔗

Rather than treating every vendor as an encroacher, the policy asked city authorities to identify and demarcate vending zones based on local conditions. The spatial planning norms under the policy specified that hawking zones should be city and town specific, so that vending plans reflected how a particular market actually functioned instead of applying a one-size-fits-all rule.

Setting up institutions for vendors to be heard 🔗

The policy proposed Town Vending Committees at the city level, meant to include vendor representatives, resident welfare associations, and municipal officials together, so that decisions on vending space were not made unilaterally by one side. This was an early attempt at giving vendors a formal seat at the table, instead of leaving them to negotiate informally with whichever official was on duty that day.

Protecting vulnerable groups within vending 🔗

The policy also flagged specific vulnerable groups within the vending community, including women vendors and child vendors, calling for measures to protect and rehabilitate them rather than treating all vendors as a uniform category. This acknowledged that vending is not a single homogenous occupation, but one where different vendors face very different risks.

From a policy paper to a parliamentary law 🔗

A policy, unlike a law, is a statement of intent. It does not bind states or municipal bodies to act. This gap became clear fairly quickly, and the government revised the policy in 2009 to underline the need for an actual legislative framework, since voluntary adoption by states had been patchy at best.

That push eventually led to the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, which converted many ideas from the 2004 and 2009 policies into enforceable law. The Act made vending certification, Town Vending Committees, and protection against arbitrary eviction legally binding on state and local governments, rather than optional best practice. Researchers studying this transition note that the 2014 law was set apart from the earlier policy in two important ways: it recognised vending as a livelihood protected under the Constitution, and it mandated that decisions over the use of public space be made through participatory mechanisms rather than administrative discretion alone.

Balancing urban planning with livelihood security 🔗

The core tension the 2004 policy tried to address has not disappeared. City planners still worry about congestion, sanitation, and traffic. Vendors still need visible, accessible locations to earn a living. Analysts describe the older approach to this tension as a conflict model, where authorities issue eviction orders without offering viable alternative sites, which only pushes vendors back onto the streets once enforcement eases. A more workable approach, recommended by urban policy researchers, is to treat vending as a planned activity built into a city’s master plan from the start, rather than an afterthought to be tolerated or removed depending on the mood of the local administration, as argued in recent analysis of India’s informal urban economy.

Even a decade after the 2014 Act, the gap between law and ground reality remains wide. Faculty researchers who have tracked implementation point out that vendors continue to face harassment and the threat of eviction even after being formally certified, showing that legal recognition on paper does not automatically translate into security on the street. Corruption in the licensing process, delays in constituting Town Vending Committees, and slow demarcation of vending zones in many cities are frequently cited reasons for this gap.

What the 2004 policy got right was the framing: street vendors are workers contributing to the city, not intruders on it. Getting the implementation right, city by city, ward by ward, remains the unfinished part of that story.

What do you think? Should Indian cities design their public spaces around vending zones from the outset, rather than retrofitting rules after markets have already grown organically? And do you think a stronger law like the 2014 Act can ever fully close the gap left by weak enforcement on the ground?

References

1. https://www.arfjournals.com/image/catalog/Journals%20Papers/ISDR/2025/No%201%20(2025)/6-Prabhu%20Prasanna-new.pdf
2. https://www.orfonline.org/research/strengthening-urban-india-s-informal-economy-the-case-of-street-vending
3. https://nasvinet.org/issues-the-street-vendors/
4. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=99161
5. https://www.wiego.org/research-library-publications/indias-national-policy-urban-street-vendors/
6. http://easeofdoingbusiness.org/sites/default/files/resources/Au233.pdf
7. https://prsindia.org/files/bills_acts/bills_parliament/2005/bill82_2006123082_National_Policy_for_Urban_Street_Vendors.pdf
8. https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-ease-of-doing-business-on-the-streets-of-india/
9. https://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/faculty-research/revisiting-indias-street-vendors-act-12-years-later