Shouldn't the government move street vendors out of busy streets and into designated vending zones?

The question rests on a misunderstanding: that a “vending zone” means a separate market, tucked away from the busy street. It does not. Congestion is a genuine concern, and footpaths must stay walkable. But shifting vendors off busy streets into segregated zones is usually the wrong fix, and often an illegal one.

Under the Street Vendors Act, 2014, a vending zone is not a fenced enclosure at the city’s edge. The law defines it to include footpaths, pavements, embankments, and portions of the street itself. It recognises that vending belongs where the pedestrians and customers already are.

A vendor sits where customers pass. The tea seller by the office block, the fruit vendor at the metro gate, the snack seller outside the college: each is answering footfall. Move them to a tidy zone with no footfall and you clean up the map while destroying the trade. The vendor loses his customers. The customer loses cheap and convenient access to daily goods. Foot traffic does not follow a planning notification.

The Act sets a high bar before an area can be closed to vending. Under Section 21 with the First Schedule, overcrowding alone is not a valid ground, and sanitation is a ground only if the mess can be blamed solely on vendors and cannot be fixed by ordinary civic action. Congestion, the usual excuse for relocation, is ruled out. Existing natural markets cannot be declared no-vending zones at all.

On paper. In practice these protections mostly stay on paper. No area can lawfully be designated a vending or no-vending zone until the mandatory survey is done and a Street Vending Plan drawn up, yet in city after city the surveys, certificates, plans, and functioning committees remain delayed or disputed. Evictions proceed anyway, dressed as zone regulation, with no working Town Vending Committee for the vendor to appeal to.

Some spots do warrant real limits: a narrow hospital gate, a dangerous junction, a school entrance at closing time. But limits should be specific, reasoned, and proportionate, not a blanket relocation triggered by the mere look of disorder. Better to survey vendors where they actually work, recognise the natural markets, mark walking and vending space clearly, and enforce the rules against every encroacher, including the parked cars and shop spillovers that eat far more footpath than any cart.