A short and thoughtful article from India’s Business Standard about efforts to regulate hawking in Kolkata. Among various solutions, Roy strongly encourages a national competition to produce designs for functional carts that fold away at night! Good idea I say..
“…To the 325,000 in Kolkata, hawking means livelihood for families at the bottom of the pyramid, made possible by young men with an entrepreneurial spirit which needs celebrating. The middle class cannot want to own cars and simultaneously say it is wrong for hawkers to usurp pavements. Private cars are the biggest usurpers of public (road) space. They gain legitimacy because the public transport system is inadequate, though it is better in Kolkata than in most other Indian cities. But hawkers themselves will go away if people cannot access them via usable roads and pavements. The aim, therefore, must be to find a compromise that is practical, civilised and does not imply the abdication of the state…”
photo credit: P.K.Niyogi. copy-left.
