In a perfect world, there would be no street vendors. Or not the kind that are ubiquitous in Kathmandu. According to Nepal Street Vendors Union, there are 25,000 street vendors in the capital, most of them plying their trades in and around the hubs of Ratnapark and Sundhara. They don’t operate from permanent stalls, or even movable carts.
Rather, the most common practice is to spread out products—clothing items, camera covers, toilet trinkets, et al—on tarpaulin spread over pavement. Even without street vendors, the pavements in Kathmandu are in a pitiable condition; derelict, without streetlights. During monsoon, muddy puddles litter the pavements. A stone is uprooted here, the railing bent like putty over there. [break]
If traversing this messy maze was not enough, pedestrians in Kathmandu have to pick their way through the ‘street shops’ that can materialize out of the blue. Sometimes they occupy nearly the entire pavement, making it impossible for the passersby to pass through comfortably without coming down to the main road.
All over the world, there is a kind of romance to street shopping and snacking. Roadside haggling is an art, hard perfected. Panipuris peddled by a roadside vendor in the bustle of Sundhara is no match for those on offer at nearby quiet setting of Rameshwaram, hygienically packed in plastic. Yet, roadside shopping and eating would be so much more enjoyable if they could be regulated a little better. It is no fun to have to run with the cobbler, bare foot, as he scrambles to safety from the prowling metropolitan police. Most of the vendors lead precarious lives. The little they earn can easily be eclipsed by hefty fines levied by municipal authorities at the end of a hard day. And there can be no arguing that the roads at Sundhara and Ratnapark are riskier for both motorists and pedestrians because of the roadside vendors, the number of whom seem to be growing by the day.
But while the problems are easier to spot, solutions are not. One of the options would be to relocate street vendors to select public spaces like Khula Manch where they can ply their trade without hassle. This has been tried in the past, to no avail. The authorities found that the designated space would soon fill up and vendors would spill over to the main roads again.
Besides, venues like Khula Manch and Brikutimandap host regular public events in a city where open space is at a premium. In fact, it is hard to see how the problem can be solved without tackling the bigger economic malaise that afflicts the country. If there were better employment opportunities, very few would take up this little-paying yet highly risky trade. Yet more street vendors are being added every signal day. It looks like Kathmandu will have to bear with unregulated street vendors for years to come. Failing to solve the problem, a bit of sugarcoating might be the order of the day: Why not make street vendors a part of the charm of this mystical, contradiction-filled city?
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