Overview

Street vendors are among the most visible yet systematically undercounted economic actors in Indian cities. The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, promised each vendor a certificate of vending, a designated space in a town vending committee, and protection from arbitrary eviction. A decade after enactment, we set out to understand what had actually changed.

The Street Vendor Atlas is a spatial and livelihood documentation project covering five cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, and Bhubaneswar — chosen to represent different urban scales, governance structures, and regional political economies.

The Cities

Delhi presented a fragmented picture: multiple agencies (NDMC, MCD, DDA) with overlapping jurisdiction, town vending committees constituted on paper but rarely convened, and an estimated 4–6 lakh vendors against a survey estimate of 1.2 lakh.

Mumbai had the most organised vendor collective structures but also the most intense real estate pressure. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had cleared vendors from eight of the twelve heritage market corridors we mapped, relocating them to sites inaccessible to their customer base.

Kolkata showed the most functional town vending committees, though membership remained skewed toward male vendors in registered markets. Home-based vendors — primarily women selling prepared food from doorsteps — were excluded from committee representation entirely.

Ahmedabad was recovering from evictions linked to urban beautification projects preceding state-level events. Vendors described a cycle: eviction, informal negotiation, return, repeat. Few had approached the vending committee grievance mechanism.

Bhubaneswar was our smallest city — selected because it was undergoing rapid Smart City infrastructure development and vendor displacement was actively occurring during our fieldwork period.

Mapping Approach

We used a mixed-methods spatial approach:

Route mapping: Research associates accompanied vendors through their daily routes — morning market setup, midday repositioning, evening peak — using GPS tracks. Over 2,200 individual route maps were collected.

Income calendars: Seasonal income calendars tracking weekly earnings, vendor-reported “bad weeks” (police harassment, rain, local events), and peak periods. We found income volatility of 40–60% across seasons for most vendors.

Eviction incident mapping: Geo-coded records of eviction incidents reported by vendors and corroborated by press and municipal records. 847 distinct incidents recorded across the five cities during the 18-month fieldwork period.

Vendor social networks: Mapping credit, supply, and information networks among vendors — who supplies whom, who lends to whom during lean periods. These informal networks proved more resilient than formal committee structures.

Key Patterns

Vendors who had certificates of vending were not significantly more protected from eviction than those without — enforcement was episodic and driven by political decisions rather than legal status. The certificate mattered mainly for access to credit from formal microfinance institutions.

Women vendors were disproportionately concentrated in lower-footfall locations, earned an average 28% less than male vendors in the same product category, and faced compounded risks from late-evening trading hours and lack of toilet access at vending sites.

Inter-generational transmission of vending was common but declining. Among vendors over 45, 71% said their children would not continue vending. Among vendors under 35, 43% had transitioned from other informal work, not inherited the trade — suggesting vending as a fallback sector for displaced workers.

The Atlas

The final output is a set of city-level maps and a comparative data report. Each city map includes:

  • Vendor density by product category and time of day
  • Town vending committee jurisdictions vs. actual vendor distribution
  • Eviction incident clusters
  • Infrastructure gaps (water, sanitation, storage)

The atlas was shared with urban local bodies in each city and with the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI). Bhubaneswar’s Smart City project team incorporated the spatial data into their revised vendor relocation plan.

Fieldwork conducted by a team of twelve research associates across five cities. Data collection ran March 2022 — September 2023.