E-Paper
The pavement pushback: Order meets reality
Street vending sits squarely at this fault line; it is economically indispensable, spatially inconvenient, and administratively unresolved
The recent expansion of municipal corporation crackdowns on street vendors across Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula has been described as a drive for “order.” That word does a lot of heavy lifting in Indian cities. It can mean clearer footpaths, smoother traffic and safer streets. Or it can mean the periodic urge to tidy up realities that refuse to stay invisible.
Street vending sits squarely at this fault line. It is economically indispensable, spatially inconvenient, and administratively unresolved. What we are witnessing is not merely enforcement. It is a moment when the Tricity is being forced to confront a question it has postponed for years. How much informality can a planned city absorb before planning itself needs revision?
Why now? The pressure cooker behind the crackdowns
The timing of the intensified drives is not accidental. Post pandemic street vending has surged across Indian cities, and the Tricity is no exception. Rising unemployment, shrinking formal retail margins, and migration have pushed more people into informal self employment. At the same time, resident complaints about blocked sidewalks, illegal extensions, fire risks and hygiene have mounted.
Municipal bodies are operating under dual pressure: Citizen grievances on one side and performance metrics on the other. Visible enforcement offers a quick demonstration of control. Confiscations photograph better than policy reform.
But enforcement heavy responses often emerge when governance systems are overstretched. Town vending committees mandated under the Street Vendors Act, 2014, remain inconsistently functional. Surveys meant to identify legitimate vendors are outdated or incomplete. Vending zones exist on paper but not in practice, or are located in areas with little footfall, making compliance economically irrational.
In this vacuum, illegality becomes a default condition rather than an exception.
The planned city’s blind spot: Informality was never designed for
Chandigarh’s planning ethos, and by extension, the Tricity was rooted in clarity. Fixed land use, clean separations, predictable movement. Informal economies were never part of the blueprint. Yet decades later, they are integral to how the city functions.
Street vendors do not simply “occupy” space. They activate it. Office corridors without affordable food, transport nodes without last mile services and residential pockets without daily conveniences quietly depend on them. Their presence compensates for gaps in formal provisioning.
The irony is sharp. Cities that pride themselves on planning now treat informality as an intrusion rather than a signal. Crackdowns attempt to restore an imagined order, one that never accounted for economic churn, demographic shifts or affordability crises.
This does not mean unregulated vending is harmless. Footpaths blocked beyond use, unsafe cooking setups and ad hoc waste disposal are real civic failures. But they are failures of management, not mere existence. Removing vendors treats symptoms while leaving the structural condition untouched.
What is missing from the debate: Capacity, not compassion
The public debate often collapses into moral binaries: Livelihood versus law, poor versus privileged. That framing is unhelpful. The more relevant question is institutional capacity.
Does the municipal system have the ability to
• conduct regular and transparent vendor surveys?
• design vending zones that align with pedestrian flows?
• enforce spatial rules consistently rather than episodically?
• integrate waste management, fire safety and design standards?
Without these, crackdowns become cyclical rituals. Vendors return, enforcement resumes, resentment deepens.
Other cities have demonstrated workable middle paths. Time based vending, standardised carts, digital licensing and participatory regulation. None of this is radical. What is radical is the assumption that erasure equals order.
The pavement, after all, is not lawless space. It is a contested space. And how a city manages contestation tells us more about its maturity than how efficiently it clears a cart.
The Tricity now has a choice. Continue governing street vending as a violation to be corrected. Or recognise it as an urban system to be designed. One approach produces headlines. The other produces cities that actually work.
