Can I see your licence?A GOOD street-food stall is the one place in Mumbai where the posh and the poor might rub shoulders, if only for the few seconds it takes to gobble down a savoury snack. You can be sure the vendor himself will have come from the latter category: hawking, as it is known, rivals taxi-driving as a time-tested route from rural poverty to something a little less wretched. But nativist politicians may change that: in the name of helping hawkers, they are trying to impose new rules that would bar most of them from the trade.
Life was supposed to be getting easier for Mumbai’s 150,000-odd hawkers. In 2014 the national parliament passed a law that required states to formalise the practice, for instance by issuing licences and designating areas where it was expressly permitted. States have been slow to comply. The government of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, had been sitting on its hands for three years. It only decided to act in the run-up to municipal elections in February.
The draft rules, however, include a requirement that would-be hawkers be domiciled in Maharashtra. Under local...Continue reading
from Asia http://ift.tt/2jcDqCB
EmoticonEmoticon