What The Hawker 'Menace' Says About Mumbai As A City

Conversation 1: An elderly gentleman, active in his gated complex, exulted on everyone’s favourite platform-for-all-purposes.

“Have you all seen the road outside our complex?” he asked excitedly of the nearly 100 members and proceeded to explain that the hawkers who had occupied the pavement, their customers spilling on to the road, were all cleared, their stalls demolished and handcarts taken away, and the road was good to walk or park cars.

Not surprisingly, many applauded the demolition that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had carried out.

Encroachments viewed differently

The said gentleman, of course, had less to say about the encroachment on another pavement nearby.

This was a set of mini-gardens randomly made by a corporate house outside its massive complex, presumably to prevent hawkers from occupying it.

The hawkers were encroachers; the corporation installing mini-gardens was not seen as such.

The hidden cost of demolitions

Conversation 2: As the May morning wore on, making Mumbai’s heat harsher, the autorickshaw driver who was taking me across seven kilometres for an appointment sighed.

He was a familiar fellow, having driven me across Mumbai for many years.

I knew he was alone in the city, sharing a room with three other men, two of whom also drove autos for a living, and went to his village in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, for about a month every year.

“There’s no affordable and clean food in our area anymore. I have to search for places to have lunch,” he explained with a sigh.

One of the stalls that had been cleared near the gated complex was where he regularly ate.

It served Mumbai’s staple vada-pav and bhaji-pav, an affordable lunch for many; a woman vendor nearby brought home-cooked dal, vegetable curry and chappatis for Rs 30-40 a plate.

It felt like a meal for the men who did not — or could not — keep a kitchen.

The informal economy behind Mumbai’s streets

The irony, he told me, was that the BMC teams on the road would also partake of the vada-pav and chappati-bhaji.

Did the vada-pavwalla have a BMC licence? Apparently, he did, but not for that vantage spot; he had been doing dhanda the Mumbai way — paying off local civic officials and cops in return for the space.

The sweep of hawker demolitions this year, especially after the BMC elections when the new mayor, Ritu Tawde, turned her ire against illegal Bangladeshi hawkers, has scarred everyone except those in the hallowed ivory towers.

Even those who live in gated complexes depend on the hawkers nearby for fresh produce like vegetables and fruits.

The eviction-demolition drive has assumed a moralistic purpose — returning pavements to pedestrians or cleaning areas of “anti-social elements”.

This, in the context of Bangladeshi hawkers, has even acquired a fervent but misplaced nationalist purpose.

BMC’s role under scrutiny

The BMC pretends that its officials were not conniving and profiteering from these hawkers all this time.

Its new-found zeal has left virtually no part of Mumbai untouched.

From Kurla, across the famous Dadar market and Andheri, to Borivali, Mulund, Mohammed Ali Road and other older parts of South Mumbai (in B Ward, 150 were evicted in one go), civic officials have been extremely busy.

Every week brings a new list, including the market near Vile Parle railway station, among the oldest in the city.

The politics of the “hawker menace”

It’s telling that the BMC, corporators, citizens, who largely comprise middle to upper-middle class residents, pedestrians and some sections of the media, repeat the term “hawker menace”.

In their imagination of the city, licensed hawkers, non-licensed hawkers and illegal immigrants, such as Bangladeshis (who may be neighbourhood plumbers, electricians and drivers), are all the same.

If illegal Bangladeshis are the issue — of course, they must be deported — why limit the eviction to hawkers and not cast the net to catch all such people across Mumbai?

Both the BMC and the middle or upper-middle class citizens are aware that hawkers, legal or otherwise, cannot occupy an inch of Mumbai without permissions or connivance of the civic body.

And the hawkers would not set up shop every morning if there was no business.

Questions of accountability

How then are they a “menace” when this vast network of informal service providers keeps the city functioning every day?

If their burgeoning numbers or the spillover is the problem — in some areas it is so — we must ask the BMC how its ward offices looked the other way all these years.

If there’s a hawker mafia operating, surely the Mumbai police can wrestle it to the ground, if it decides to.

What’s missing in this messy scenario is the responsibility and the accountability of the BMC itself.

It hardly acknowledges its own role in the expanding numbers of legal or illegal hawkers taking over pavements.

Citizens, who applaud the demolition, are loathe to demand answers.

Street vending law and civic responsibility

It was always the BMC’s explicit responsibility to allocate public space, including designated areas and pavements, in every area of the city to hawkers as per the Street Vending Act and keep everything else free for pedestrians.

This and related decisions are the purview of the Town Vending Committees.

Why has the BMC dragged its feet on operationalising them?

The accountability is just as important.

The BMC owes it to everyone to enforce the law at all times, without bias and favour, so that the spaces allocated to pedestrians and hawkers are used appropriately.

Indeed, pavements must be clear for people to walk — please demolish the illegal hawkers but also the mini-garden encroachments — but for the BMC to turn pedestrians against hawkers or crack down on hawkers as “encroachers” is to mask its own failure of implementation.

Mumbai’s changing urban character

Hawkers, whose services are desired but who are seen as a “menace”, fit neatly into the problematic neoliberal narrative that Mumbai must have road space for parking private cars but must not accommodate hawkers for their livelihood or for the basic sustenance of millions of outdoor workers — a glimpse of the city that’s fast turning classist and intolerant of the less privileged.

Smruti Koppikar, an award-winning senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and can be reached at smruti@questionofcities.org.

Published on: Thursday, May 07, 2026, 09:28 PM IST