[Reader-list] Public Space and Hawkers

[Zainab Bawa]

November Diary

1st November 2004

Public Space???

These days, hawkers are the main targets. They are now being pushed away 
from the railway stations as well. (Earlier they were being thrown away from 
the seafront and were under surveillance from the police.)

In a news snippet in today’s Times of India (‘Anti-hawker drive 
intensified’), it was reported that the civic staff had evicted nearly 200 
hawkers in the previous week from Mulund railway station. Last December, the 
apex court had ordered no-hawking zones within 150 metres of railway 
stations and 100 metres of religious places and educational institutions. In 
keeping with the Supreme Court directive, the BMC has also started lodging 
police cases against the hawkers. (Yet civic activists of the South Mumbai 
type are not convinced with the BMC’s action.)

While I write about the hawkers, my mind is filled with questions concerning 
the concept and practice of public space. Who has claims to public space? Do 
hawkers get targeted because they are not ‘registered citizens’? Or are 
hawkers being targeted with growing population and decreasing space? Perhaps 
tomorrow some other group might be on target!

If hawkers are being targeted because they are ‘illegal’, then I wonder 
what constitutes legality and what of illegality? Is the hawker 
himself/herself an illegal entity or is it about his/her establishment 
(which might be a problem for the shopping malls)?

One of the other thoughts that comes to my mind is that removing hawkers / 
relegating them to margins seems to me as removing us everyday people from 
the experience of our immediate environment and locality (though I am very 
unsure at this point as to whether there are any ‘us and them’ camps 
here). As hawkers are being removed, we are increasingly entering the 
domains of the ‘shopping malls’, the idea of the global market, though I 
don’t make this statement as pointing guns towards consumption. It is 
simply about removing ourselves from locality, furthering ourselves from our 
immediate environment and issues.

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