At 4 am on Saturday, a vegetable vendor named Pangabai Andher was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant in the luggage compartment of a Mumbai local train. Andher’s family suspects she was killed because someone else wanted to occupy her regular spot in the suburban Borivli market. The 55-year-old hawker had been selling vegetables in the same spot for 20 years, but many new entrants were also seeking space for themselves in the crowded market, Andher’s son told Hindustan Times.
While investigations in the case are still underway, the politics of hawking spots are an open secret in Mumbai’s street-vending sector. Murder may be an extreme step, but hawkers who have been in the business long enough have many stories about vendors getting beaten up for not paying their unofficial rents on time.
These rents – paid to the self-appointed owners of tiny patches of road or pavement – are independent of the haftas or weekly bribes that hawkers have to pay to police or municipal officials.
“Across the city, in almost every hawking area, there are four or five dabang men who claim particular areas as their own and extract rents from vendors who hawk there,” said Sandeep Yeole, who quit street vending nine years ago and now works in the construction business.
These dabang (bold, strong) men, says Yeole, tend to be local thugs with political affiliations. At times, though, they could also be old, retired hawkers who decide to rent out their regular spot on the street to new vendors.
“All of this is informal and completely illegal,” said Mecanzy Dabre, the Maharashtra convener of the National Hawkers’ Federation. But to the hawker who is forced to pay up if he wants to continue his business, this hardly matters.
When Yeole left the hawking trade a decade ago, the average rent rate in Mumbai was Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000 a month. Today, in keeping with inflation, the rates have increased.
Gopal (name changed), a 45-year-old children’s clothes vendor who has been hawking outside Santacruz station in western Mumbai for 15 years, occupies two adjacent pitches on the road. Each is just 9 sq ft in area and he has to pay rent to two different owners. “One charges Rs 3,000 a month, the other Rs 3,500,” said Gopal. These plots, though invisible to most people, are marked very definitively by tiny nails hammered into the tar.
“The plot rates in this area can go up to Rs 5,000 a month,” said Gopal, who earns an average of Rs 10,000 a month but can take home less than a third of it after paying all his illegal dues to multiple hafta-collectors and his two self-appointed landlords.
According to Yeole, Dadar has been one of the most expensive areas for hawkers since the rent trend began in the 1980s. “Today, rents for 50- or 60-sq ft plots could go up to Rs 30,000 a month, and during festivals like Diwali, rents are much, much higher,” he said. “The plot owners have muscle power, so if any hawker fails to pay up, they can get beaten up.”
Leaders of hawker unions say that the police and civic authorities are well aware of this rampant extortion. “But they are interested in collecting their haftas, which is now a massive money-making business,” said Haider Imam, general-secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress.
On average, hawkers in Mumbai end up paying Rs 100 a day to six or seven different hafta collectors from the police and various municipal departments. Officially, there are around 15,500 licensed hawkers in Mumbai, and more than 1.5 lakh unlicensed ones, based on Imam’s conservative estimate. “This would mean that hafta-collection is more than a Rs 1,000 crore business annually,” said Imam. “What motivation would authorities have to stop the illegalities?”
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While investigations in the case are still underway, the politics of hawking spots are an open secret in Mumbai’s street-vending sector. Murder may be an extreme step, but hawkers who have been in the business long enough have many stories about vendors getting beaten up for not paying their unofficial rents on time.
These rents – paid to the self-appointed owners of tiny patches of road or pavement – are independent of the haftas or weekly bribes that hawkers have to pay to police or municipal officials.
“Across the city, in almost every hawking area, there are four or five dabang men who claim particular areas as their own and extract rents from vendors who hawk there,” said Sandeep Yeole, who quit street vending nine years ago and now works in the construction business.
These dabang (bold, strong) men, says Yeole, tend to be local thugs with political affiliations. At times, though, they could also be old, retired hawkers who decide to rent out their regular spot on the street to new vendors.
“All of this is informal and completely illegal,” said Mecanzy Dabre, the Maharashtra convener of the National Hawkers’ Federation. But to the hawker who is forced to pay up if he wants to continue his business, this hardly matters.
When Yeole left the hawking trade a decade ago, the average rent rate in Mumbai was Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000 a month. Today, in keeping with inflation, the rates have increased.
Gopal (name changed), a 45-year-old children’s clothes vendor who has been hawking outside Santacruz station in western Mumbai for 15 years, occupies two adjacent pitches on the road. Each is just 9 sq ft in area and he has to pay rent to two different owners. “One charges Rs 3,000 a month, the other Rs 3,500,” said Gopal. These plots, though invisible to most people, are marked very definitively by tiny nails hammered into the tar.
“The plot rates in this area can go up to Rs 5,000 a month,” said Gopal, who earns an average of Rs 10,000 a month but can take home less than a third of it after paying all his illegal dues to multiple hafta-collectors and his two self-appointed landlords.
According to Yeole, Dadar has been one of the most expensive areas for hawkers since the rent trend began in the 1980s. “Today, rents for 50- or 60-sq ft plots could go up to Rs 30,000 a month, and during festivals like Diwali, rents are much, much higher,” he said. “The plot owners have muscle power, so if any hawker fails to pay up, they can get beaten up.”
Leaders of hawker unions say that the police and civic authorities are well aware of this rampant extortion. “But they are interested in collecting their haftas, which is now a massive money-making business,” said Haider Imam, general-secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress.
On average, hawkers in Mumbai end up paying Rs 100 a day to six or seven different hafta collectors from the police and various municipal departments. Officially, there are around 15,500 licensed hawkers in Mumbai, and more than 1.5 lakh unlicensed ones, based on Imam’s conservative estimate. “This would mean that hafta-collection is more than a Rs 1,000 crore business annually,” said Imam. “What motivation would authorities have to stop the illegalities?”
