Cabinet Grants Approval to the Bill on Street Vendors

The Union Cabinet has given its nod of approval to the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill 2012. This Bill is aimed at protecting the rights of street vendors and regulating their activities in public places. 

According to this report by Muhammad Ali in The Hindu, the Bill proposes to abolish the much-criticized system of compulsory license for vendors and introduce a scheme for prior registration with Town Vending Committee on payment of an one-time fee. License-raj for street-vendors has been widely condemned for casting a web of illegality over a vast majority of street-hawkers in this country and exposing them to endemic harassment by police and municipal authorities. 

(See Law, Liberty and Livelihood by Parth Shah and Naveen Mandava; and Urban Informal Sector: The Need for a Bottom-Up Agenda for Economic Reforms - Case Studies of Cycle Rickshaws and Street-Vendors in Delhi by Madhu Kishwar published in the India Urban Poverty Report 2009 brought out by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation and UNDP)     

Enactment of a law in this regard has also been mandated by the Supreme Court of India in Gainda Ram v MCD (2010). In that case (available here), the Court had observed:

 "There is no denying the fact that hawking and street-vending should be regulated by law. Such a law is imminently   necessary in public interest...Most of the hawkers are very poor, a few of them may have a marginally better financial position. But by and large, they constitute an unorganized poor sector in our society. Therefore, structured regulation and legislation is urgently necessary to control and regulate fundamental right of hawking of these vendors and hawkers."

Indeed, the Supreme Court had directed that the appropriate government must legislate and bring out the law to regulate hawking and hawkers' fundamental right by June 30, 2011.