Unions to protest against BMC’s leaving out 90% of hawkers from eligible list
BMC plans to legalise 32,415 street vendors by August 31, issuing licenses through the town-vending committee. Hawker unions push for more inclusion
MUMBAI: By August 31, the BMC plans to legalise 32,415 street vendors by issuing them licenses through the town-vending committee (TVC). As per the BMC’s list of eligible hawkers, Goregaon’s P South ward leads with 3,807 street vendors, followed by A ward in South Mumbai with 2,808, and Andheri-Juhu’s K West ward with 2,470.
While the BMC is all set to put to rest a decade-long process of legalising hawkers, eight hawker unions met on Tuesday to discuss the way forward so that more than 32,415 hawkers are incorporated in the eligible hawkers list.
“This entire process is a sham,” said Shashank Rao, president of the Mumbai Hawkers’ Union. “If the BMC is discounting over 90% of the city’s hawkers, how is it saying it is implementing the process? The entire process would make sense if at least 80% to 90% hawkers were accommodated.”
According to Rao, the list of eligible hawkers was prepared “haphazardly” in 2014 after a survey that lasted all of eight days. “We had told them not to do it hastily and submitted our objections,” he said. “We even moved court. The primary town-vending committee in 2014 had also advised the BMC to take its time in surveying each ward.”
Elaborating on the randomness of the 2014 exercise, Rao narrated the case of an office-bearer and veteran member of the hawkers’ union who had all the valid documents but went to the BMC with photocopies instead of originals. “He told the BMC official that he would get the originals from home but the official insisted that he submit the photocopies,” he said. “Later, he was declared ineligible on this ground. This was the injustice meted out during the 2014 survey. The BMC deliberately hurried up the process to exclude a majority of hawkers.”
Rao pointed out that the Street Vendors Protection and Livelihood Act, 2014, said that 2.5 percent of a city’s population could be legally engaged in hawking. “By this calculation, more than 300,000 hawkers can be accommodated or at least 80% percent of that number,” he said. “Legalising only 32,415 hawkers will help neither the hawkers nor the people of Mumbai. The whole point of this exercise should be to organise hawkers, not eliminate them.”
The eight unions will devise a strategy to petition the BMC to incorporate more hawkers in the list, and will deliberate on their future course of action to make this happen. The unions involved are the Maharashtra Ekta Hawkers’ Union, Mumbai Hawkers’ Union, Azad Hawkers’ Union, Jai Hindustan Hawkers’ Union, Ekta Hawkers’ Union, AITUC Hawkers’ union and two more.
Rao added that the Street Vendors Protection and Livelihood Act (2014) also required the BMC to conduct a survey on hawkers every five years. “A fresh survey of hawkers should have been done last year instead of using the ten-year-old survey of 2014,” he said. “The BMC has clearly violated the Act.”
The union leader categorically stated that just because the hawkers were not included in the list, it did not make them illegal. “They are unlicensed hawkers whom the BMC survey did not acknowledge as eligible for frivolous reasons and despite them having documents,” he said. “The problem of regularising the hawkers, which the Act primarily looks at, is not yet resolved. What this means is there will be more proliferation of unlicensed vendors and this problem will persist. It’s the same old game being played again.”