These street vendors from Delhi, brought a lot of joy among participants, during a recent conference in Gummersbach, Germany I went to VFS office at Nehru Place in Delhi to collect my Schengen Visa to attend a workshop in Germany. After the work, I went to the busy Nehru Place market, where I saw couple of police men, harassing these female street vendors, who were making beautiful named hand bands. Police was screaming on them, and they were collecting their stuff in hurry to move away and in the process, loosing their stuff. I started engaging with police, about the issue. Police said they are not supposed to sit here, they create problems for the people who walk in the market. When I resisted that, no one seems to have a problem with them and a lot of people are happily getting the name tags done, Police just murmured and walked away. After the police men left, these hand band maker women came back and put their street shops back. They told me that these police fellows take money and even then keep harassing them. While working with the think tank Centre for Civil Society, I have closely learnt this topic form Parth J Shah and Amit Chandra that how in 1991 India liberalized for many sectors of business BUT people at the bottom of the pyramid are still working under heavy license permit quote raj. These street vendors are not able to expand their business beyond the reach of their arms (so that they can quickly run away, whenever police/officials come). Now as the Street Vendor bill is passed, we can look forward for more street vendor friendly norms in near future. Luckily I had the participant/moderator list of the conference with me and i gave these hand band maker women the order to make 40+ named hand tags. On the starting day of the conference in Germany, I gifted these named tags to all the participants and these so called illegal street vendors, brought a lot of happiness to the participants from 20+ countries....
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 09:03:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015