When Cities Crave Street Food but Evict the Vendors
- BerryBeat Team
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
A city can love a plate of pani puri and still refuse the person who made it a place on the pavement.
That is the moral confusion sitting at the heart of India’s street food culture today. We celebrate the flavour, the speed, the memory and the price. We turn neighbourhood snacks into reels, listicles, delivery menus and food hall concepts. We call street food the soul of the city.
Then the same city sends officials to remove the cart.
In Bengaluru, this contradiction has become painfully clear. In June 2025, the Karnataka Progressive Street Vendors Association pointed to a striking gap. The PM SVANidhi scheme had issued loans to more than 70,000 street vendors in the city. Yet when the BBMP conducted a survey to identify vendors with legitimate vending rights, it found just over 20,000.
Thousands of people could be recognised by the state as borrowers, but not recognised by the city as workers.
That is not a small administrative mismatch. It is a civic wound. It tells vendors that they are visible when they owe money, but invisible when they claim space, dignity and legal protection.
Bengaluru shows how recognition can become a trap
The Bengaluru numbers reveal a strange bargain between the state and the informal worker.
Through PM SVANidhi, a vendor may be worthy of a loan. The vendor may submit documents, enter a database, receive credit and be counted in a development success story. The same vendor may still be treated as an encroacher when standing at the cart that makes loan repayment possible.
Credit without legal security is not empowerment. It can become a softer form of control.
If a vendor borrows to improve stock, buy equipment or restart after Covid-era income loss, that loan assumes the vendor can continue earning. But eviction breaks that assumption. A cart seized, a stall removed or a daily vending spot disrupted can damage income instantly. The debt remains.
This is why the gap between 70,000-plus loans and just over 20,000 surveyed rights matters. It is not only about paperwork. It is about the right to work being split into two unequal halves.
One half says: take the loan.
The other half says: leave the pavement.
In March 2024, BBMP evicted 40 street vendors from Jayanagar. The case matters because Jayanagar is not a marginal part of Bengaluru. It is a planned, middle-class neighbourhood, known for markets, homes, colleges, eateries and walkable commercial pockets. Its vendors are not outside city life. They are part of it.
A Bengaluru vendor named Naveen Gowda described the mechanism to researchers in blunt terms:
“People in middle and upper class neighbourhoods click our pictures and share them on WhatsApp groups. Then the BBMP and police officials come and attack us.”
That sentence captures a new form of urban policing. It is not only the municipal vehicle or the police visit. It is also the resident group, the phone camera, the forwarded image, the complaint framed as civic improvement.
The street vendor becomes an object in someone else’s idea of order.
This is where the discussion around India street vendor eviction 2024 2025, Street Vendors Act 2014 implementation failure, BBMP Bengaluru street vendor eviction Jayanagar, India street food gentrification premium food hall, pani puri Rs 499 food hall vs street vendor eviction, PM SVANidhi loans vendors evicted India stops being a cluster of policy terms and becomes one connected story. Food, law, class and land are colliding on the same footpath.
The language used against vendors often sounds neutral. Congestion. Cleanliness. Traffic. Obstruction. Beautification.
Some of those concerns are real. Pavements must be safe. Fire access matters. Waste must be managed. Pedestrians, disabled people, children and older residents need usable public space.
But the question is not whether a city needs regulation. Of course it does.
The question is why regulation so often begins with removal, and why the burden of urban order falls hardest on the people with the least protection.
The Street Vendors Act promised rights before removal
The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, did not come from nowhere. It followed decades of legal struggle, organising and court battles. It recognised something India’s cities had long tried to avoid: street vending is work, not nuisance by default.
The Act created a framework to protect livelihoods while regulating public space. Its core idea is simple and radical for Indian urban governance: vendors cannot be treated as disposable. They must be surveyed, represented and given a role in decisions that affect their work.
The law requires Town Vending Committees, often called TVCs, to include vendor representatives. It calls for surveys of vendors. It provides for certificates of vending. It asks cities to create vending plans and vending zones. Most importantly, it prohibits eviction before surveys are completed and vending committees are functional.
That sequence matters.
Survey first. Plan next. Regulate through a committee. Protect livelihood. Remove only through due process.
When cities reverse that order, the law exists on paper but not on the street.
This post is informational and editorial, not legal advice. Still, the broad principle is clear. The 2014 Act was meant to move vendors from a world of arbitrary raids into a system of rights, representation and rules.
Twelve years after the Act’s passage, an Azim Premji University study published in June 2026 found that implementation “remains incomplete”. It also found that vendors are more familiar with PM SVANidhi loans than with their statutory legal rights, and that vendors with recognised certificates continue to face eviction and harassment.
That is a sharp indictment.
It means the state has been more successful at delivering credit than delivering rights. It can enrol vendors into schemes, but struggles to protect them from the very institutions that govern streets.
This failure is not only technical. It is political.
A functioning vending law requires cities to share space. It requires resident welfare associations, traffic police, municipal officials, market traders and vendors to sit inside a rules-based framework. It reduces the power of sudden complaint-driven eviction. It makes the pavement a democratic site, not merely a surface to be cleared.
Without that, the certificate becomes fragile. The survey becomes selective. The vending zone becomes delayed. The law becomes a promise that vendors must keep proving they deserve.
The deeper tragedy is that many vendors do not know the full scope of the law meant to protect them. That knowledge gap is not accidental. Legal rights do not spread by magic. They need translation, meetings, unions, help desks, accessible notices and local officials who are willing to explain rather than intimidate.
A loan scheme can arrive through a bank, an app, a camp or a target-driven administrative push. A right requires confidence. It requires the vendor to say, “I am allowed to be here,” even when the person confronting them wears a uniform.
That is a different kind of power.
Street food rises in status while street vendors are pushed out
At the same time, something else is happening in India’s food culture. Street food is moving upward.
Not the vendor. The food.
Pani puri, chaat, vada pav, chole bhature, kathi rolls, momos, dosas, kebabs and bun maska now travel easily into malls, premium food halls, airport lounges, delivery-first kitchens and menu concepts built for affluent diners. They appear under mood lighting. They arrive plated with microgreens, tempered yoghurt, edible flowers or imported cheese. They become “nostalgia”, “comfort”, “regional inspiration” or “playful Indian dining”.
There is nothing wrong with chefs interpreting street food. Indian food has always travelled, borrowed and changed. A snack can belong to many hands over time. Taste is not a museum.
The trouble begins when the original worker is erased from the value chain.
A vendor may spend decades perfecting a pani puri water in a Colaba lane. A small dhaba in Kamla Nagar may build a loyal following over twenty years for chole bhature. Those foods carry labour, risk, muscle memory and customer trust. They carry rent negotiations, police pressure, early morning supply runs, family work and seasonal uncertainty.
Then the same food appears in a premium setting at ₹499 a portion. Chole bhature appears at ₹495 on an upscale casual dining menu. A delivery brand borrows the visual language of the street, but not the obligations owed to street workers.
The cuisine receives elevation. The cook receives suspicion.
This is the gentrification of taste. It extracts flavour from the street while treating the street as a problem.
A city that pays ₹499 for pani puri in a Worli food hall has no right to pretend that a pani puri cart is beneath civic dignity. A customer who praises “authentic street-style chaat” on a delivery app should ask what happened to the people whose working conditions made that style possible.
There is a class code hidden inside the plate.
The same sizzle is charming indoors and dirty outdoors. The same crowd is atmosphere in a food court and obstruction on a pavement. The same queue becomes proof of popularity when it forms inside a mall, but evidence of nuisance when it forms near a cart.
The food is not the problem. The location is not even the full problem. The person serving it is ranked through class.
Food media has to face this honestly.
For years, Indian food writing has celebrated “hidden gems” with affection. That attention can help vendors. It can bring customers, pride and local fame. But it can also turn working-class food spaces into content backdrops without asking whether the vendor has a licence, water access, storage, toilet facilities, protection from eviction or bargaining power with authorities.
The romance of street food can become another form of consumption.
It is easy to describe the crunch of sev, the heat of aloo tikki, the tang of tamarind, the smell of pav on an iron tawa. It is harder to describe the fear of hearing a municipal truck arrive.
Yet both are part of the same story.
If food culture wants to be worthy of the food it celebrates, it must widen its frame. The review cannot stop at taste. The story cannot stop at price. The reel cannot stop at the cheese pull. The basic question should follow every plate: does the person who made this food have the right to keep working?
The pavement is not empty land waiting to be cleaned
Indian cities often speak of pavements as if they are neutral surfaces. In reality, pavements are contested economic spaces.
A street vendor’s location is not random. It is chosen through years of observation and negotiation. Near a bus stop, there is breakfast demand. Near a college, there is evening snacking. Near an office cluster, there is tea. Near a market, there are shoppers who need affordable food. Near hospitals, there are families who cannot pay canteen prices every day.
Street vending works because it is close to the daily rhythms of ordinary people.
Remove vendors from these places and the city does not become more efficient for everyone. It becomes more expensive for the people who rely on them. Security guards, students, drivers, sales staff, delivery workers, nurses, construction workers, domestic workers and lower-paid office employees all depend on street food ecosystems.
A ₹20 tea stall is infrastructure. A breakfast idli cart is infrastructure. A fruit vendor outside a bus stand is infrastructure.
They may not look like metro lines or flyovers, but they keep the working city fed.
The usual argument says vendors block pedestrians. Sometimes they do. Bad layouts, poor waste management and overcrowded pavements create real problems. But eviction is a lazy answer to a design problem.
A rights-based city would ask better questions:
Which pavements can safely host vending without blocking movement?
Where do pedestrians need clear, protected walking space?
How can vending zones reflect actual customer demand rather than push vendors into dead areas?
What waste, water and storage systems would improve hygiene?
How can vendor representatives help design local rules?
What complaint process prevents elite neighbourhood pressure from turning into instant removal?
These are not impossible questions. They are governance questions.
The 2014 Act already gives cities a route. Survey vendors. Form committees. Issue certificates. Mark vending and no-vending areas through due process. Hear objections. Give notice. Create alternatives before removal. Keep livelihoods at the centre.
What blocks this approach is not lack of imagination. It is lack of will.
A city that can build elevated corridors, underground metro lines and glass-fronted food courts can create fair vending plans. A municipality that can track property tax, traffic fines and loan beneficiaries can maintain transparent vendor records. A state that can celebrate start-ups can recognise that a street cart is also an enterprise.
The vendor is not outside the economy. The vendor is the economy at its most immediate scale.
There is also a gender dimension that deserves more attention. Many street food businesses rely on family labour that remains unseen. Women may prepare chutneys, knead dough, chop vegetables, wash utensils, manage accounts or vend directly. When a stall is evicted, the loss spreads through the household. It affects school fees, medical care, rent and debt repayment.
Eviction is not a single-day event. It lingers.
It can force vendors to borrow again. It can push them into more precarious locations. It can make them dependent on local strongmen or informal payments. It can break customer relationships built over years. It can turn a working household into a household in crisis.
That is why “encroachment” is too small a word for what is being destroyed.
Food lovers should not be neutral about who gets to cook
Food is memory, but it is also labour. It is culture, but it is also land use. It is joy, but it is also law.
The Indian urban middle class often wants street food to remain available, affordable and photogenic, while also wanting streets to look sanitised, controlled and free of mess. That contradiction cannot hold forever. If every cart is treated as illegal, street food will survive mainly as an aesthetic inside spaces that many people cannot afford.
That would be a loss for taste. It would be a bigger loss for justice.
The future of Indian street food should not be a choice between chaos and eviction. There is a better path, and it is already written into the spirit of the Street Vendors Act.
Cities can create vendor registers that are public and clear. They can make Town Vending Committees functional, not decorative. They can stop evictions before surveys are complete. They can train municipal officials and police on the law. They can design vending zones around real footfall. They can provide waste systems, water points and storage. They can create fair complaint processes that do not turn resident WhatsApp groups into shadow enforcement bodies.
Food businesses that profit from street food can also do better. Restaurants, food halls and delivery brands can credit the traditions they borrow from with seriousness. They can collaborate with legacy vendors, pay for training, create shared pop-ups on fair terms, and support vendor rights campaigns. They can stop using the word “street” only as decoration.
Food writers, influencers and diners can change the conversation too.
Ask whether a famous stall has a vending certificate. Ask whether a neighbourhood eviction happened without a completed survey. Ask why a vendor with customers and a clean setup is treated as a civic threat. Ask why premium cafés can monetise the same food that municipal officials remove from the pavement.
None of this requires guilt at every meal. Guilt is too weak a politics. It fades after dessert.
What we need is loyalty.
Loyalty to the people who feed the city before restaurants open, after offices close and during every long commute in between. Loyalty to the craft that lives in repetition, not in branding. Loyalty to the belief that public space should serve more than cars, gates and smooth facades.
A city does not become world-class by hiding its workers. It becomes humane when the people who keep it alive can stand without fear.
Street food is not only a category of cuisine. It is a claim to the city.
When a vendor sets up a cart, they are doing more than selling breakfast or chaat. They are making an argument with their presence. They are saying that the pavement is a place of work, that affordable food matters, that skill can live outside formal property, that a city belongs also to those who cannot rent a shop.
That argument deserves protection.
The next time a plate of pani puri arrives under premium lights, remember the hand that perfected it without those lights. Remember the cart that faced rain, rent, police pressure, resident complaints and municipal uncertainty. Remember that the taste India celebrates was built by people who still have to fight to be counted.
The city wants the cuisine. It must now make room for the cook.
