An action plan is being prepared for formulation of the policy at the earliest, in view of the recent directions by the Central Government. About four lakh street vendors and hawkers will be benefited by the proposed policy.

Chief Minister K Rosaiah today asked the officials to hasten the State Action Plan for formulating the policy. Under the proposed Street Vending Policy, the State Government will constitute Street Vending Committees, issue identity cards, and also conduct survey and enumeration of street vendors with the help of non-governmental organisations. The Government will also extend loans at 25-paise interest rate to street vendors under MEPMA (Mission for Elimination of Poverty in Municipal Areas).

The officials have been asked to complete the enumeration of street vendors/ hawkers by November 30 and issue identity cards to them by March 31. The policy on street vending is aimed at improving the scope of urban poor to earn better livelihood, provide a clean environment in public places and on the streets, ensure hygienically prepared food for the consumers and control street congestion, apart from improving law and order and security.

The proposed Action Plan includes GISbased identification of vending zones, formulate draft amendments to the Town Planning/Municipal Acts, finalise the strategies for implementation of new policy and establishment of a dedicated cell in the office of the Commissioner and Director of Municipal Administration.

Action Plan

* GIS-based identification of

vending zones

* Draft amendments to Municipal Acts

* ID cards for vendors

* Loans at 25 paise interest

The ‘India: Urban Poverty Report, 2009’, prepared with the support of the United Nations Development Programme has certain revealing facts. According to the study, an estimated 23.7 per cent of the urban population was living in slums amid squalor, crime, disease and tension.

The key finding of this report is that poverty in Indian cities is not an overflow of the poverty in villages but has happened because of the faulty nature of urbanisation.

This is mainly due to poor city planning, urban land management and legislation. The distinct character of urban poverty is that it was not about only nutritional deficiency but deficiencies in the basic needs of housing, water, sanitation, medical care, education, and opportunity for income generation.

The report finds that urban workers were being increasingly pushed into the informal sector, even as the space for informal economic activities was gradually shrinking. And within the informal sector, the profile of the work in urban areas has moved from wage-employment to selfemployment, which carries its own uncertainties.

So the urban poor was increasingly a street vendor, a rickshaw puller, a rag picker, a cleaner, a washerman, a load carrier or a domestic servant. While these workers contributed to the growth of cities, there was a growing trend to push them to the urban periphery, as they were increasingly seen as threat to the ‘Globalcity’ dreams! In the event, though the share of poor in urban population had fallen, because of the increasing pace of urbanisation and the changing face of urban employment, the absolute number of urban poor had risen. As many as 81 million or 25.7 per cent people (2004-05) subsist in urban areas on incomes that are below the poverty line. Eighty per cent of their meagre income goes towards paying for food and energy, leaving very little for meeting the cost of living in an increasingly monetised society.

The Human Development Report commissioned recently for Mumbai, India’s largest metropolis and ‘commercial capital’, only confirms this urban distress.

Despite having the highest per capita income in the country (Rs 65,361), over 1.2 million ‘Mumbaikars’ earn less than Rs 591 per month. More than half of Mumbai’s population lives in sub-human conditions in shanties, but the land the slums are situated on comprises just six per cent of the city’s total land area.

This, in a city where posh apartments are routinely sold for anywhere between Rs 10 to Rs 25 crore and an Ambani brother builds a Rs 800 crore super-luxury mansion! For Chennai, India’s fourth largest metropolis, there is no authentic survey or report on the ‘face of urban poverty’. The Second Master Plan, notified in September 2008, says only this: “Below Poverty Line population during 1999-2000 in Chennai City, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur were 9.58%, 1 3 . 2 % a n d 19.18% respectively.” But the comparative figures for homelessness, the worst form of urban poverty and deprivation, tells a different tale. In 2001, the total urban homeless population was 7,78,599 and Tamil Nadu had a high 7.3% compared to Delhi at 3.1% and Bihar 1.6%. Extreme poverty topped the list of reasons why people came to the streets with the highest being 73.75% in Chennai. The situation may be worse now! While so, Chennai’s Master Plan makes only a cursory reference to the city’s economic base as having shifted from trade and commerce to administration, then to manufacturing and now to services like Information Technology, IT Enabling Service and Business Process Outsourcing.

There was no in-depth study, analysis and evaluation of the city’s economy and the extent of poverty. This is conceded in the Master Plan document itself, which is now calling for such a study that is yet to commence! Chennai has a Master Plan for land management, regulation, resource allocation, infrastructure investments and urban basic services that has been drafted without an understanding of the city’s economy and its most vulnerable population.

Adverse effects of the Liberalisation- Privatisation-Globalisation agenda, perceived as the root cause of ‘urbanisation of poverty’ has not been studied and factored into the Master Plan or any other development initiatives in Chennai. This is leading to extremely skewed investment and resource allocation, which invariably works against the poor. Is this the government’s way of ‘prioritising the poor’? ‘Inclusive development’ is the slogan being shouted from every platform.

The question is how can development be inclusive if the decision-makers do not even know whom and what to include?