Social Security for Street Vendors

By Sharit K. Bhowmik on January 01, 2006

STREET vendors form a very important component of the urban informal sector in India. It is estimated that the total number of street vendors in the country is around 10 million.1 They comprise around 2% of the total population in the metropolitan cities. This paper broadly defines a street vendor as a person who offers goods for sale to the public at large without having a permanent built-up structure from which to sell. Street vendors may be stationary in the sense that they occupy space on the pavements or other public/private spaces, or mobile in the sense that they move from place to place by carrying their wares on push carts or on their heads. The terms ‘street vendor’ and ‘hawker’ have the same meaning and are often interchanged. We will discuss the problems of street vending and then deal with some of the initiatives taken for providing social security. In the latter part we will deal with the National Policy for Urban Street Vendors/Hawkers and the issue of social security.

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