Minority Women Vendors in India
India’s assault on street vendors is often dressed up as urban management, cleanliness, or traffic discipline. But in today’s India, that language increasingly conceals something harsher: a political project that decides whose labour is visible, whose hunger is acceptable, and whose presence in public space is treated as a threat. The promise of the Street Vendors Act, 2014, was simple enough: regulate vending without criminalising livelihood. Yet the gap between law and practice has become a theatre of humiliation. In Delhi, NASVI’s June 2025 representation documented how even vendors with certificates were allegedly harassed, their goods seized, and their stalls dismantled. At the same time, The Hindu reported that about 20,000 vendors had been affected in the capital since late April 2025.
Women are not a side note in this story; they are at its centre. According to WIEGO’s Delhi case study, women make up about 30 percent of Delhi’s street vendors, but only 10 to 15 percent are unionised. An ISEC policy brief puts women’s share at roughly 40 percent nationally and notes that nearly 30 percent are sole earners in their families. The state is happy to celebrate women’s entrepreneurship when it can be turned into a success story: a PIB note said 44 percent of PM SVANidhi beneficiaries are women, while a March 2025 parliamentary reply said 30.97 lakh women had benefited, and 69 percent of all beneficiaries came from OBC, SC, and ST communities. But credit without legal protection is a cruel joke. A woman can get a loan in the morning and lose her vending spot by afternoon.
Law on Paper, Punishment on the Pavement
The deeper problem is that anti-encroachment politics has become a convenient bridge between administrative power and majoritarian prejudice. In June 2025, UN experts warned that India’s arbitrary demolitions were disproportionately affecting minorities and marginalised communities under the language of punitive action and anti-encroachment. Human Rights Watch’s 2025 India chapter likewise noted unlawful demolitions of Muslim homes and properties. Once the state normalises bulldozer justice, the street vendor becomes an easy target: too poor to litigate quickly, too visible to ignore, and too disposable in the eyes of authorities chasing spectacle over rights. This is why eviction drives cannot be read as neutral civic housekeeping. They are increasingly part of a hierarchy of belonging.
For women vendors, the cost is immediate and bodily. A recent WIEGO brief on Delhi found that nearly seven in ten vendors reported holding ration cards, with higher access among women vendors, underscoring how closely vending is tied to household survival. An ISST survey of women vendors found that 52 percent had lost the means to work and 34 percent reported a significant fall in income, while many described police seizure of goods and repeated fines. When women in the informal economy are evicted, they do not just lose a shopfront; they lose food security, bargaining power at home, and any buffer against violence. The pavement is not merely a workplace. It is the thin line between survival and destitution.
Gendered Vulnerability, Communal Targeting
The latest Union government reply based on NCRB data shows 445,256 crimes against women in 2022, which works out to about 50.8 complaints every hour. Another MHA response in December 2024 noted that Women Helpline 181 was functional in 35 States and Union Territories and that 750 Fast Track Special Courts were operating in 30 States and Union Territories by October 31, 2024. These mechanisms matter. But minority women in the informal sector often confront a brutal reality: formal remedies exist, while practical access does not. Reporting harassment to police is difficult for any poor woman; it becomes harder still when the men threatening her are backed by vigilante networks, communal narratives, or local political patronage.
That is where majoritarian politics becomes economically devastating. It does not need a written law to crush minority livelihoods; it needs only a public vocabulary of suspicion. The India Hate Lab’s 2025 report documented 1,318 verified hate-speech events, and a PARI summary said 98 percent of those events targeted Muslims. The report also traced how conspiracy tropes such as “love jihad,” “land jihad,” and other fabricated demographic threats are folded into electoral and social mobilisation. The South Asia Justice Campaign’s 2025 annual overview argued that these narratives helped normalise calls for exclusion, expulsion, and economic boycotts of Muslims, while the APCR hate-crime tracker recorded campaigns advocating boycotts of Muslim-owned businesses. When Muslim vendors are branded as infiltrators, outsiders, or civilisational threats, the market itself is communalised. Buying fruit, toys, clothes, or tea becomes recast as a political act of loyalty.
We have seen the script before. Al Jazeera’s report from Haryana described open calls for the economic boycott of Muslim businesses. The Guardian reported how compulsory public name displays in two states deepened exclusion and fear for Muslim workers and businesses. An India Today report on digital vigilantism showed how doxxing, mass harassment, and coordinated intimidation increasingly connect online targeting to offline pressure. For women vendors, this ecosystem is especially dangerous: once a locality, cart cluster, or surname is circulated online as suspect, the next step may be extortion, forced closure, assault, or public shaming.
What a Constitutional Response Would Look Like
A serious democracy would not answer this crisis with more surveillance, more demolitions, or more rhetoric about order. It would enforce vending certificates, compensate for illegal seizures, prosecute vigilante intimidation, and treat economic boycott campaigns as attacks on equal citizenship. It would also admit that livelihood policy cannot be divorced from communal politics. If the government can publicise that PM SVANidhi has disbursed more than 96 lakh loans to over 68 lakh vendors, it can certainly ensure that those vendors are not brutalised by the same state machinery that claims to empower them. And if WIEGO has warned that street vendors already face severe health and income shocks from extreme heat, then eviction, communal targeting, and digital vigilantism amount to a triple burden imposed on the poorest workers in the public sphere.
The question, finally, is not whether India has laws, schemes, or slogans in support of women and the poor. It is whether those promises survive contact with majoritarian power. Street-vending women, especially Muslim women, are being forced to answer that question every day with their bodies, their earnings, and their fear. An India that allows its humiliation in the name of order is not defending the street. It is abandoning the Constitution.
