Implementation of a rational hawking policy also tunes in well with the PM’s Smart Cities Project. In Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and other East Asian countries, hawker markets are a great tourist attraction apart from being a vibrant part of the urban landscape and economy for local citizens, just as flea markets are in European cities. But in India, we continue treating street traders as an unwanted nuisance even while being dependent on their services on a daily basis. If in our neighbourhoods, pheriwalas were not bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to our doorstep all day long, we would have to spend an hour or two to drive to nearby markets to buy these necessities, wasting precious time and petrol, while adding to traffic jams, pollution and vehicular congestion in the already-congested markets of our cities where car parking has become a nightmare.

In 2004-05, Manushi had executed a pilot project in collaboration with Delhi Municipal Corporation to showcase by concrete example how vendors need not be a source of squalor and chaos as at present; that with proper urban planning and civic discipline, hawker markets can be transformed into lively, aesthetic spaces with world class standards of hygiene and cleanliness. Additionally, the municipality can earn crores of rupees per month by way of a monthly rental fee which can keep increasing as business potential rises. Since vendors of our pilot project in Sewa Nagar began paying monthly tehbazari fee to the municipality, they felt secure enough to refuse paying bribes. Not surprisingly, this bribe-free and garbage-free zone became an eyesore for the local hafta-collecting mafia and the police, especially since the UN Commission for the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, on its own initiative, made a documentary film on it to project it as an international role model for pro-poor economic reforms.

Cutting across party lines, the local municipal councillor, MLA and MP joined hands to take over the pilot project by unleashing a reign of terror. Apart from violent attacks on the vendor members of the project, I too was subjected to a series of murderous attacks so as to terrify everyone else into submission. The situation became so dangerous that even if I entered the area under police protection, thugs patronised by local politicians would gather in a mob to lynch me. And every time they beat any of us, they would also file false counter-cases against us—many of which are still dragging in courts eight years after those tragic events.

Seeing our plight, the then Lt Governor of Delhi ordered that CCTV cameras be installed in the pilot project area, and the local goons behind the sabotage of the pilot project be externed from Delhi. However, since the police and politicians were backing the goons, we never got the required protection, and the pilot project got taken over by political goondas.

The point behind narrating this traumatic saga is to bring attention to the fact that by denying legal status to street vendors, the government has put them at the mercy of mafias who work hand-in-hand with the criminals in uniform working inside police stations. This, in effect, means that public places in our cities and towns are firmly under the control of goonda elements—both sarkari and private. This is a major reason for the growing crime rate in our cities.

The experience of the Sewa Nagar pilot project also demonstrated that the police and municipal agencies deliberately create conditions of chaos, filth and squalor in and around hawker markets so that the citizens see them as a nuisance (even while using their services) and therefore, to them, clearance operations appear justified.

Thus, on the one hand, the government claims that it wants to encourage enterprise, create employment and start-ups. On the other hand, its official machinery is busy wrecking livelihoods by trapping a perfectly legitimate occupation into a web of illegality.

The economic potential and contribution of these nano entrepreneurs should not be underestimated. Taking an example from Delhi, a large number of Punjabi refugees who arrived as destitutes from Pakistan following Partition, started off as footpath traders in places such as Karol Bagh, Chandni Chowk, Janpath, and so on. Within a couple of decades, almost all of them succeeded in building prosperous business establishments and many diversified into the manufacturing sector as well. Gulshan Kumar of T-Series fame built a prosperous media empire even though he started off as a fruit juice seller in a tiny kiosk in Daryaganj.

Upward mobility comes fast in retail trading. Many of the vendors who set up operation in high footfall markets like Connaught Place or Sarojini Nagar have today acquired middle-class status in terms of income, even though they started off as poor migrants from rural areas a couple of decades ago. This, when they have lived under constant terror and insecurity with their goods confiscated every now and then—making it necessary for them to seek “protection” from local mafia dons. Imagine how much faster they would have prospered had they been allowed to operate with freedom and dignity.

Unfortunately, in the two years of the Modi regime, there has been no attempt to bring the security of livelihood to street vendors. Consequently, bribe rates have escalated, and the hold of extortionist mafias deepened manifold. Today, the minimum hafta being extracted from the humblest pushcart vendor is Rs 1,500 per month, with much higher amounts being charged from stationary vendors with fixed stalls. For instance, in Nehru Place, for each stall (meaning a flat wooden platform without any cover) the police and MCD extort anything from Rs 500 per day because of higher business potential in that area. The rates in Connaught Place are even higher. Given such high amounts demanded, often two or more vendors run a stall in partnership, so they can split the monthly or weekly hafta payment between them.

This provides an idea of the earning potential as well as the revenue generating potential of street vending. If the vendors are given legal status, our resource-starved municipalities can generate huge amounts by way of revenue from tehbazari fee which can easily be regulated as per the income generating potential and customer footfall in different areas. At an average of Rs 500 per month per stall, nearly 400,000-odd vendors of Delhi can generate revenues of Rs 200,000,000 per month. Security that comes with legal status would not only enhance their incomes but also help them diversify into other trades more easily. Bribe-free vending will also mean a lower price for consumers. At the moment, at least 30 percent of a vendor’s income goes into payoffs to police, municipal officials and political touts. That, in effect, means that every time we purchase vegetables, fruits or any other goods, we are paying at least 30 percent more. Therefore, legalising the status of vendors is of enormous benefit to consumers.

Well-organised hawker markets with easy rule-based access would also provide easy marketing outlets for our farmers, artisans, handicraft and handloom producers who are at the moment able to earn only a small fraction of the price paid by consumers for their produce because the middlemen take away most of the profit.

However, for dismantling the existing corruption- and crime-ridden system, the government has to go far beyond enacting this or that law. It requires far-reaching municipal reforms. Given the existing crime-infested state of our municipalities, they neither have the administrative expertise nor the political will to manage our public spaces in a dignified manner since they have only gained one form of expertise—extortion. The task of administrative reforms at this level has thus far been neglected by Modi government, which is why even the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has not made much headway.

The moment the government creates artificial hurdles in economic activity, it generates corruption and crime. For instance, for centuries, India, as the home to the best goldsmiths in the world, freely traded gold for making jewellery which found ready buyers all over the world. But during the heydeys of Nehruvian socialism, unrealistic restrictions and heavy customs duties were imposed on import of gold.

Consequently, gold trade, a perfectly legitimate activity, acquired a sinister form—gold smuggling, which gave birth to countless small and criminal syndicates and transnational mafia dons.

This is true in every field of enterprise, including the farm sector. For instance, the tight bureaucratic controls on “change of land use” prevents farmers from using their land for diversifying into other economic activities, be it setting up a milk processing plant, or making cider from the apples they grow, or for that matter, carving out plots for housing colonies. That is where political mafias step in, buy land from farmers at dirt-cheap prices through underhand deals of the Robert Vadra variety, and then sell the same land at astronomical prices after procuring official permission for “land use change”.

This has also kept land prices artificially high and forced the urban working classes to live in illegal slums while paying protection money to political overlords and local mafia dons in cahoots with the police. If the government were to make it easy for farmers to get “land use change” permits, it would not only enable farmers to diversify easily but make land prices more realistic.

A bottom-up agenda of economic reforms is the most effective way to decriminalise our economy and polity, and enable people to move out of the poverty trap through their own endeavours, instead of depending on the munificence of the Mai Baap Sarkar.

Madhu Purnima Kishwar is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). She is the founder of Manushi—A Journal about Women and Society, and founder-president of Manushi Sangathan, a forum for democratic reforms.