Cobblers struggle for right to sell plastic chappals

Despite the ongoing struggle to get the provision back, it is set to become obsolete in about two months with the rollout of the Street Vendors Act, 2014

MUMBAI: Back in 1978, the city’s cobblers fought for a provision on their licences to sell plastic chappals along with plying their trade. In the 2010s, this provision slipped out of their hands when licenses switched to digital format. Despite the ongoing struggle to get the provision back, it is set to become obsolete in about two months with the rollout of the Street Vendors Act, 2014.

“We were allowed to sell chappals in our old licenses, which I inherited from my father,” said Khandudeo Ghanshyam, 69, who plies his trade on a footpath at Dadar station. (Raju Shinde/HT Photo)

“We were allowed to sell chappals in our old licenses, which I inherited from my father,” said Khandudeo Ghanshyam, 69, who plies his trade on a footpath at Dadar station. “Over the years, as customers looking to mend their shoes dwindled, selling plastic chappals became our main stream of income. Now we are no longer allowed to sell them.”

The fate of Ghanshyam and other cobblers hangs in the balance. Considered hawkers under the Street Vendors Act, whether they will be allowed to sell chappals is yet to be determined.

The chappals conundrum dates back to 2010 when licenses began to be generated digitally. “Before that, they were handwritten,” said Ganpat Kamble, president of the Charmoudhyog Parvanadharak Hakk Samiti union, showing a blurry xerox of an old license. “Officers would manually add that we were allowed to keep and sell plastic chappals.” In the licenses issued from 2010 onwards, the space after ‘Commodity permitted’ lies empty.

The union wrote to various departments to have the earlier provision reflected in the digital licenses. There were, Kamble said, a minimum of 50 such cobblers with pitch licenses in G North ward, covering Dadar West, Matunga and Mahim, who had the same issue. He added, however, that only cobblers with pitch licenses faced this issue, as those who chose to convert their pitch licenses to stall licenses in 1998-99 were permitted to sell them.

Meanwhile, action against the cobblers continued, ranging from mild questioning and orders to put the chappals back in their box to the destruction of the boxes. This has increased in recent months with the wider action taken against hawkers outside Dadar railway station.

Umesh Jadhav, who inherited his late father’s stall outside Dadar station in 2017 described the scene in March 2023. “The BMC came with its JCB and destroyed the steel boxes in which we store our goods,” he said. “It took us a good 15 days to get new ones made after appealing to officials.”

Jadhav has almost put a stop to the cobbler trade his father acquired in the 1980s, as there is simply too little business. He sells not just plastic chappals but also shoes arranged atop and on the sides of his steel box. “If I sat here only to mend shoes, only flies would visit,” he said. The money too is much better: if selling chappals makes him ₹600 a day, mending them earns him barely ₹100 on a good day. Ghanshyam too agreed that mending makes up less than 5% of his income.

After several meetings with the BMC’s license department in 2023, it seemed like the matter was progressing. A letter from the license department agreed that those with cobbler pitch licenses should be allowed to sell slippers and in October that year, the G North ward office distributed forms to be filled. The cobblers under the union did the needful.

But then, radio silence followed. A last meeting with the license department promised union reps that they could meet those handling the license software to get the change made. However, that promise has yet to materialise. “All we want is that tiny change in the license software,” said Kamble, adamant that cobblers’ licenses should remain different from those of hawkers.

Officials from the BMC’s license department, however, had a different take. “The cobblers were given the licenses long ago on the basis of caste,” said one. “The chappals were allowed on condition that they remained in a box and were not on display. But now some of them have entirely left their cobbler trade and just sell slippers. This isn’t allowed as per the license.”

The official admitted that the licence department had agreed to include the chappals provision in the digital licenses, but claimed it was a non-issue. “With the hawker elections under the Street Vendors Act, cobblers will also come under the purview of the Act, which will be the decider of permissions,” he said. “Everyone will be given pitch licenses. All this will be history then.”