4 min readMumbaiJun 16, 2026 04:19 AM IST
First published on: Jun 15, 2026 at 07:51 PM IST
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has extended the deadline for the registration process of hawkers by 10 days till June 26 with only 28,000 of the 99,000 hawkers in the city having verified their registrations.
The BMC is proposing to distribute identity cards equipped with Quick Response (QR) codes to hawkers in Mumbai. The overall move of issuing QR codes to hawkers is aimed towards curbing Mumbai’s long pending issue of removing illegal encroachers from the roads in order to make them more pedestrian friendly.
In order to distinguish authorised vendors from illegal ones, the BMC has started issuing QR code equipped identity cards to hawkers and in total 99,345 hawkers will receive these cards, many of whom had registered themselves in a survey conducted by the BMC back in 2014, as part of the formulation of a Town Vending Committee (TVC).
Civic officials said that all the 99,000 hawkers have been called to the ward offices to confirm their details of registration and so far 28,000 or 28 percent of these hawkers have turned up. The officials said that once the registration is completed, the ID cards will be issued to them. The process of verifying the registration began on June 5 and was supposed to be completed by June 15. However, speaking to the Indian Express a senior official said that the deadline has been postponed till June 26.
“We had submitted our statement in the Bombay High Court (HC) stating that we would need an extension to our deadline. So far, only 28,000 of the total registered hawkers have turned up and at present, we have verified that many of these hawkers are not in town. Therefore, we have to wait till they return,” an official told The Indian Express.
The officials said that the maximum number of verifications have been carried out in central Mumbai’s Dadar which is a hub for hawkers, followed by the Colaba and Churchgate areas in south Mumbai, as well as Goregaon in the western suburbs. By visiting the ward offices each hawker will have to verify their names, their survey number and their location and jurisdiction. The officials maintained that the QR card will give the BMC as well as the Mumbai Police an instant confirmation on whether a verification is legal or not. The civic officials maintained that the card will also make the process of taking action against illegal hawkers easy.
Once the ID cards are issued, hawkers are likely to be distributed hawking pitches for carrying out their business. The action of selecting and allocating these pitches will be taken by the Town Vending Committee (TVC) which will work towards allocating dedicated pitches and shopping zones for hawkers by freeing up encroached public spaces. To curb the issue of hawker menace in Mumbai, the civic administration had mooted the implementation of a hawkers’ policy that will also work towards legalising vendors and hawkers, thus making it easier for the administration to identify illegal hawkers and launch a crackdown on them.
“The draft of this policy was formulated in 2020, however due to the pandemic outbreak its implementation couldn’t happen. The body of elected representatives got dissolved in 2022 and since four years now we don’t have an elected body. Therefore, only after the corporators came back in January this year, we could move ahead with this,” said a civic official.
BMC has extended the hawker registration verification deadline to June 26 after only 28,000 of nearly 99,000 registered vendors completed the process. (File Photo) 
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