In the past year and a half, it became a common picture – people setting up shops at roadside corners and turning the back of cars into make-shift stores selling groceries. COVID-19 was taking people’s jobs and sending them to the streets to sell what they could cook at home or buy at cheaper rates from retailers. Inhibitions had suddenly withered away and all anyone cared about was a steady income to take back home. It’s perhaps in this light that a Union government study found over one lakh street vendors in Kerala, a vast difference from the numbers found in a 2015-2017 survey by Kudumbashree. Taking this as a cue, another survey is now underway.
The 2015-2017 survey was done as part of the Union government’s National Urban Livelihoods Mission (NUML), for which Kudumbashree is the nodal agency in the state. “One component of the mission is to support street vendors. So we did the [earlier] survey across 93 municipalities and corporations and recorded 24,643 street vendors. They were given ID cards, and committees were formed for them in every municipality,” says outgoing Executive Director of Kudumbashree, Harikishore.
When COVID-19 struck, the Union government brought out a scheme by which the street vendors could take a collateral-free loan of Rs 10,000. “We informed the nearly 25,000 vendors we had recorded in our survey and only about half of them applied for the loan. That’s when the Union government said that a study showed there were at least 1.2 lakh street vendors in Kerala,” adds Harikishore.
“It is not just COVID-19 that led to the rise in the number of street vendors, but the fact that our earlier survey had not taken into consideration the various agglomerations in rural areas where a large number of street vendors could be found,” says Jahamgeer, state programme officer for urban schemes of Kudumbashree.
Urban agglomeration is a continuous urban spread constituting a town and its adjoining outgrowths, or two or more physically contiguous towns together.
He figures there are at least 359 panchayats with rural agglomerations and this will make a big difference.
After the earlier survey, committees – Town Vending Committees – were formed as part of the Street Vendors Act, 2014, and have members representing street vendors. The representatives of street vendors in Town Vending Committees were mostly nominated but this time they are being elected, Jahamgeer adds. “Elections are over in 21 of the 53 municipalities in urban areas.”
At least 40% of the members are to be elected members representing street vendors while the rest are formed by municipal commissioner as the chairperson, local body officials, police and revenue officials and others nominated by the state government.
Municipality secretaries are to do surveys in urban areas and panchayat secretaries to do surveys in agglomerations. The survey in urban areas is to be completed by July 16 and in the rural areas a week after that.