Delhi to legally employ vendors

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New Delhi: The plan on how to incorporate street vendors into Delhi's skyline has been in the loop for the last five years.

Now an ambitious new proposal is in the offing, which offers clean streets and legally employed thela-walas.

Come 2008 and most of the congested vending sites in Delhi may undergo this transformation.

With the state government having passed the Special Provisions Bill delaying city demolitions and evictions for a year, looks like the Urban Development Ministry wants to finally regularise street vending.

It has already accepted an action plan that NGOs Manushi and Sewa have chalked out for this.

Says Minsiter of state for Urban Development, Ajay Maken, "By 2008-2009, it's possible that we will have an action plan, identification of squatting zones, identification of beneficiaries and also identification of more NGOs and pilots in some places. This is something we've targeted for our one year moratorium and the rest will follow."

What this means is:

• Census of of all the 3.5 lakh hawkers in the city

• Identification of hawker zones

• Distribution of I-cards to hawkers

• Fixing collection fee from vendors

• Setting up a task force to create aesthetically designed hawker zones

However, regulatory concerns persist.

Says Manushi's Madhu Kiswar, "It is not important to just create hawking zones. It is more important to make sure that legitimate vendors get spots rather than MCD employees, police and their own people claiming hafta."

Despite the Government trying to protect vendors, lakhs of vendors are still racked with the menace of paying haftas (a fixed weekly amount of money) to the local mafia along with the constant threat of eviction and confiscation of goods.

Says a vendor, Kishan Lal, "Putting up one table costs Rs 300 but I cannot sit where I put up my table because I do not pay hafta. Where do I get the money from?"

It's an open secret that MCD and local police are often beneficiaries of the current system, which is perhaps why nothing was done even after the National Policy for Street Vendors was formulated in 2004.

Even the Sewa Nagar Model has been in the midst of several legal tangles, but with state elections around the corner and commonwealth games looming large, it seems that there is finally some pressure from the top to get things going.