Should street vending be allowed only for poor people who have no other source of income?

No. Vending is not a poverty-relief scheme, and the right to trade should not depend on proving you are desperate enough to deserve it.

The worry behind the question is fair. Public space is limited, and if the moneyed and connected move into vending, they may seize the best pitches and squeeze poorer vendors out. Reserving the trade for the poorest sounds like a way to protect the weak. It does the opposite.

Vending is enterprise, not only welfare. A person vends because she is poor, but also because she has a skill, a good location, family labour, low capital, or a product people want. A retiree selling tea, a woman selling weekend snacks, a migrant selling phone covers: each is engaged in peaceful exchange. The state may govern how vending uses the street. It has no business deciding who is morally poor enough to trade.

A means test also builds a trap. If a vendor succeeds, hires a hand, buys a second cart, or wins a steady clientele, does he forfeit his right to vend? Such a rule punishes the very mobility the trade exists to offer, and rewards hiding income from the inspector.

Enforcement makes it worse. To admit only the “truly poor,” the state would need income checks, asset checks, and periodic verification, the whole apparatus handed to local officials and their intermediaries. The well-connected would secure their poverty certificates. The genuinely vulnerable would be excluded or shaken down.

Section 5 of the Act carries exactly this flaw. It lets a vending certificate go only to someone who declares he “has no other means of livelihood.” The clause is divorced from how vending works. Many vendors have seasonal income, family support, a second small trade, or plans to grow. The condition is rarely enforced, because enforcing it would demand an intrusive and unworkable poverty audit. What remains is a bad legal fiction: the statute insists vending is only for the destitute, while the street shows it is ordinary enterprise.

Keep entry open. Regulate conduct. Govern space transparently. Do not make poverty the price of admission to honest work.