When many people use public space for private purposes, who should decide who gets to use it, where, and when?

Decisions about a street should be made as close to that street as possible. The use of a market lane, a temple entrance, or a metro exit is intensely local knowledge, and no central ministry or distant municipal headquarters holds it. It cannot know when the lane crowds, where pedestrians really walk, where loading happens, or which stretch turns unsafe the moment vendors are cleared. The Street Vendors Act, 2014 is a Union law running across India. It leaves room for state rules and city schemes, but many design choices still come down from above, and that sits uneasily with the case for local control.

The Act also puts too much faith in planning. It imagines the street can be governed through surveys, certificates, vending zones, no-vending zones, and vending plans. Some planning is unavoidable. Emergency access, pedestrian movement, sanitation, and fire safety need firm rules. But a plan cannot capture the living knowledge of a street: where customers stop, when the crowd forms, which corner turns unsafe after dark, and how all of this shifts across the day. That knowledge is scattered among the people who use the place. Vendors know which pitches sell. Pedestrians know where walking gets hard. Shopkeepers know when deliveries land. The municipal officer, sitting elsewhere, rarely knows any of it in real time.

When the law ignores this scattered knowledge, informal order fills the gap. Vendors work out who sits where, whose long-standing claim holds, how disputes settle, and how newcomers find room. These arrangements can be unequal or coercive. They also prove that people build workable rules when the formal law fails to supply them.

The Act’s answer is mainly political: the Town Vending Committee. Representation helps, but committees can be captured, stalled, split by faction, or reduced to one more layer of discretion. A market answer asks a different question. Where public space is scarce and commercially valuable, why not price its temporary use in the open? Cities already do this for parking, through fees, contracts, and hourly rates. There is no principled reason vending space must be handed out by committee while parking is handed out by price. A transparent fee, auction, or time-slot is usually less arbitrary than an inspector, a councillor, or a committee deciding who deserves to stand where.