Word: kishwar
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Dates: during 2007-2007
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...Others asked, how could poor food vendors cook at home when they live in cramped single-room quarters? "Delhi is a city of migrants," says Madhu Kishwar from Manushi Sangathan, a street vendors' collective. "Someone running a food stall probably lives in a miserable hovel where there's no space for cooking. And if you remove all the street food hawkers, who would feed the millions of brown collar workers, many of who were rural migrants and lived in similar hovels with no space or time for cooking? Certainly, nowhere else could they find full meals for as little...
...Will it work? "The policy is completely untenable," says Kishwar. "We have worked with the MCD on model hawker bazaars, but these don't work. Street vendors make their livelihood under conditions that cannot be created artificially in a new area." Narain Das, a food vendor in the Nehru Place commercial complex, says most vendors are ruled out from the start because they cannot comply with the court's hygiene requirements. "And where will they find land to build shops for hundreds of thousands of us?" he asks. Commercial property prices in Delhi are similar to those in major financial...
...least, the vendors are staying put. "All that has changed is that instead of having to pay a thousand rupees [$25] as bribe to MCD workers or cops, they now have to pay two thousand rupees" says Kishwar. "If the vendors were actually removed, it wouldn't serve anyone's purpose...
...Kishwar, the solution lies not in relocating the vendors, but in upgrading their operations. "Instead of trying to remove street food stalls," she says, "the MCD should provide them facilities so they could improve their standards of hygiene. The only reason these vendors operate in less hygienic conditions than those on the streets of Singapore or Bangkok is that the MCD does not give them proper facilities like clean water supply, electricity and proper drainage...
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