- (1.) A street vendor / hawker is a person who offers goods for sale to the public at large without having a permanent structure / place for his activities. Some street vendors / hawkers are stationary in the sense that they occupy space on the pavements or other public / private places while others are mobile in the sense that they move from place to place carrying their wares on push carts or in baskets on their heads.
(2.) In last four decades, there has been manifold increase in the number of street vendors / hawkers in all major cities in the country. One of the many factors responsible for this phenomena is unabated growth of population without corresponding increase in employment opportunities. The other factor is the migration of rural population to the urban areas. A large section of the rural population has been forced to leave their habitat because of massive acquisition of land and substantial reduction in the number of cottage industries, which offered source of livelihood to many people in the rural areas and even those living in the peripheries of the urban areas. In recent past, many lakh youngsters have moved from the rural areas to the cities with the hope of getting permanent source of livelihood but a substantial number of them have become street vendors / hawkers because their expectations have been belied. One reason which has contributed to this scenario is that unlike other sections of the urban population, they neither have the capacity and strength to demand that the Government should create jobs for them nor do they engage in begging, stealing or extortion. They try to live with dignity and self-respect by doing the work as street vendors / hawkers.
(3.) The importance of street vendors and hawkers can be measured from the fact that millions of urban poor across the country procure their basic necessities mainly from street vendors / hawkers because the goods, viz., cloths, hosiery items, plastic wares, household items, food items, etc., sold on pavements or through push carts, etc., are cheap. The lower income groups also spend a large proportion of their income in purchasing goods from street vendors / hawkers.;