If we don't cap the number of street vendors, won't every pavement and market lane become impossible to walk through?

The Act already caps them, and the cap is the problem. The Street Vendors Act, 2014 does not throw the street open to all comers. It says vendors identified by survey should be accommodated up to a norm of 2.5% of the ward, zone, or city population, subject to the holding capacity of each vending zone. In a ward of one lakh people, the law assumes room for roughly 2,500 vendors.

The instinct is not absurd. Streets, metro exits, market lanes, and bus stops are shared. Vendors are not their only claimants. Pedestrians, cyclists, residents, delivery workers, and ambulances have claims too, and the street is not empty land for anyone to occupy at will.

The trouble with 2.5% is not that it limits numbers. Public space is scarce, and some control over how many vendors crowd a given place may well be needed. The trouble is that a single population-based figure treats unlike places alike. Chandni Chowk, Sadar Bazaar, and Sarojini Nagar hold small resident populations against enormous daily footfall and a long history of vending. Tie the quota to residents and you undercount the commercial life of exactly the places where vending thrives. Meanwhile a quiet stretch of Dwarka or Vasant Kunj may carry a larger resident population but far fewer natural vending spots, and there the same 2.5% overstates what the street can bear. There is no magic number. A street’s carrying capacity cannot be read off its population.

The cap also raises a plainer problem. Vending is an occupation, and Article 19(1)(g) protects the freedom to carry it on. We fix no numerical ceiling on restaurants, kirana shops, salons, or tuition centres. They are disciplined by demand, rent, competition, and reputation. Vendors feel these same signals: crowd one product into one lane and earnings fall, and some move on. The state should step in against obstruction, nuisance, and danger. It should not treat the sheer number of vendors as the harm.

The strongest case for a cap is that vendors, unlike shops on private property, use public space. That is true, and it argues for a space-based rule, not a crude population percentage. The better question is not “how many vendors should a city allow?” but “how many can this particular pavement or square hold without choking movement, safety, and its other legitimate uses?” Public space needs rules. It needs rules built on actual capacity, treating vendors as entrepreneurs and citizens, not as a population to be rationed.