FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2024
Tallulah D'Silva
One of my student’s older sister Snehal came over one day super excited that she was helping her husband on a new task of selling vegetables and fruits door to door. Her husband was working as a housekeeping staff in a nearby local hotel/homestay and was now jobless because of the lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic in Goa and the complete shutdown of the tourism sector. She works as a house maid for half a day post lunch and manages her home and other tasks in the morning. Since she lives in a quaint neighbourhood with lots of seniors and working people it was logical for her to coerce her now jobless husband to try this initiative to bring essentials like local vegetables, fruits to the doorstep of many who were unable to or needed help to do the same. I was so happy to see her and was very impressed to see how enterprising they both were. Instead of staying idle or wasting time in waiting for a job, they had taken the initiative to go out and create a job for themselves. They looked at the opportunities that required the least investment and opted for something that needed hardships and consistency and building a network. I congratulated her and spoke to her husband to encourage him on this new enterprise.
The same week I met Kimberly, Soham, Irfan and Hetal at the road junction at the periphery of a large residential colony. They had a small car with its rear neatly organised with trays of different fish - shrimps, crab, mackerel, lady fish and shellfish. There was also a neat banner placed on the side of the jeep - ‘Fresh fish for sale’. They were my old students and their friends who I had a chance to mentor. They had recently graduated and seeing no opportunities of a placement or employment in the near future due to the pandemic and economic slowdown, they decided to try their luck with entrepreneurship. They used their savings and pooled resources as seed funding to begin this initiative. I was thrilled to see their enthusiasm and enterprising spirit. Yesterday I met a couple on the roadside selling catch from the manos! Nella explains that her husband Pritam used to manage a fast food stall nearby and because of the pandemic had to completely shut down as his staff had returned to their village in Nepal. He did not know what to do. It has been months with no work and earning. Nella used to help him run the stall. So she encouraged him to help her with sourcing fresh catch from the manos nearby and sell it on the roadside adjacent to a residential colony where there was a demand for the commodity. And it had worked.
Grace, a senior citizen who lives in the neighbourhood near to this road junction was concerned that these new ‘hawkers’ were like outsiders encroaching into their neighbourhood and could possibly lead to thefts and other crimes if encouraged to hawk there.
But did you know that anybody can sell their wares on the street side? As per Section 37 of the Street Vendors Act under Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of street vending, any individual can sell goods to the public without having a permanent structure or place for his activities. This means even you and I can do this if we do not have a job or any other source of income to support our family.
Grace has another incidence to share. Recently there was a group of four young boys who had entered into her gated colony in spite of surveillance and high walls and gates. They had sticks with hooks and had managed to pluck some ripe fruit from the chickoo and guava trees in the garden and had run out when she had raised an alarm. But this was not it, after this they found a foreigner waiting in her car at the road junction and had harassed and intimidated her with lewd gestures and remarks. I had found Grace and the lady foreigner standing hapless at the road junction and after they explained their predicament had chased after the boys to catch them and address the situation. With no body on the streets and high walls and closed boundaries the boys had escaped with no accountability.
Professor Padma another senior and scientist from the same neighbourhood and my most favourite person, feels that the new hawkers are a welcome set of users because the streets were otherwise deserted and having these enterprising vendors meant that the streets in their neighbourhood now had ‘eyes’. And therefore this meant that the streets that were earlier unsafe and had less custodians, now had more activity, memory, safety and ownership by all its collective users.
Let me explain what Professor Padma means. ‘Eyes on the street’ was coined by Jane Jacobs a well-known urbanist who often wrote about and advocated more people and activity on urban streets- walking, pedestrianization, cycling, vendors, hawkers, etc. What does all this do to the street and the neighbourhood? It makes the street more live, active and vibrant. But most of all these eyes on the street encourages a natural ownership or proprietorship of the street that is now better equipped to handle strangers and therefore makes it safe for all. It reduces crime and increases public safety!
Remember how our elders used to live in their old houses in the cities earlier? There were hardly any barriers, most houses had low compound walls, the visual connect was always there, one could even call out to neighbours across the street. Vendors of all kinds- the milkman, fisherlady, poder, vegetable vendor, toddy tapper, newspaper vendor, etc- would be regulars on the streets going door to door with their goods and wares. All streets were safe and all neighbourhoods were safe because of these many eyes of a variety of custodians on the street.
Kudos to all young entrepreneurs and new vendors. You are the new custodians we critically need to boost our slumped economy and as new eyes keep our streets safe and free from crime.
(Tallulah D'Silva is an
architect.)
