Organising The Street Vendors in India: Issues, Challenges and Successes

This chapter discusses The Context of Street Vendors in India: A Tale of Invisible Visibility in August during the Executive Committee Meeting of National Alliance of Street Vendors of India (NASVI). During the Mumbai workshop, a vendor talked about the idea of a Natural Market, as a place where buyers naturally congregated, such as at a temple or a hospital, as opposed to places where municipal authorities attempted to rehabilitate evicted vendors where buyers did not come automatically. The Street Vending Act states that no existing street vendor can be displaced until the local authorities conduct a census of street vendors in the concerned urban centre and prepare a City Vending Plan. Representatives of street vendors will constitute 40 per cent of its membership and women will comprise at least 33 per cent of the street vendors’ representatives. Another factor which brought vendors closer to NASVI is its holistic understanding of vendors’ needs.