Mumbai: BMC deliberately delaying hawkers policy, allege town vending committee members

“BMC is using the reference of a state government scheme, which was set aside by the Bombay High Court in November 2017, to implement hawkers policy. On the basis of that scheme, the civic body made guidelines for the policy which are illegal. BMC has also laid down a condition of providing domicile for hawker eligibility.This is wrong as Section 3 of National Street Vendors Act, 2014 doesn’t mention any domicile condition for hawker registration. BMC should only ask for identity proof, proof of residence and documents to show that hawkers are doing business in that particular area,” said Syed Haider Imam, a central TVC member.

Syed said, “This domicile issue has reduced eligible hawkers from 99,000 to about 25,000. In many cases civic officials are deliberately locating hawkers at different locations so that they can go to court and stop the further implementation. Government officials
don’t want to implement the policy because it will eliminate their over Rs 300 crore per month ‘hafta’ collected from illegal hawkers.”

In 2014, BMC had carried out a hawker survey and accepted 99,000 forms as eligible. Now, in October 2018, the BMC has released numbers of eligible hawkers as 25,000.

“There is no ambiguity in the rules and we are going ahead with the implementation as per the policy. Domicile requirements are necessary to give licences. The delay in finalizing the hawkers’ final list is because several zonal TVCs are yet to send their final reports.”

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