Social media was full of criticism, memes, and ridicule directed at city corporations and the ruling BNP-led government over the recent zoning initiative for street vendors. Many rushed to conclude that the government is simply “legalizing street vending.”
But this reaction misses a basic reality: Street vending is already a permanent fixture of Dhaka’s urban life, and pretending otherwise will not free the footpaths.
The real question is whether street vending will remain chaotic, exploitative, and politically controlled, or whether it can be brought under a more rational and regulated system. In that sense, the proposed hawker management policy warrants serious debate rather than lazy dismissal.
The idea of zoning vending is not new. Countries across continents have used designated vending zones, night markets, and licensing systems to manage public space while recognizing that street vending is part of the urban economy.
The Bangladesh government’s recent policy follows a similar logic. It seeks to register hawkers digitally, designate vending locations, create weekly and night markets, regulate fees, protect pedestrian movement, improve hygiene, and bring at least part of this informal economy under official oversight.
On paper, this is a significant shift from the endless cycle of eviction, return, and informal extortion. And such a shift is badly needed.
Street vending is tied to the survival of millions. The informal economy, of which street vending is a significant, visible part, remains central to Bangladesh’s labour market. Globally, around two billion people work in the informal economy, most without social protection or decent working conditions.
In Bangladesh, the Labour Force Survey 2022 found that nearly 84.9% of the workforce is engaged in informal employment. A recent study on street vending conducted by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) found that most vendors come from highly marginalized and poor families, and many simply cannot afford the large upfront capital required to start a business, including the advance payment needed to rent a formal shop space in Dhaka.
Migration is a major part of this story. Nearly three-fourths of the vendors in our survey had come from other districts in search of work. Rural job scarcity, environmental shocks, and the lack of sustainable earning opportunities outside Dhaka continue to push more people into the city.
More vending spots open because more people are arriving with no realistic alternative. One local resident in Mirpur told us that the current sprawl of vending around the circle is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that the number of vending spots has increased dramatically over the last decade.
If the government does nothing, Dhaka’s roads and footpaths will become even less bearable for the next generation of pedestrians and commuters.
So the policy’s core aim is understandable and, in some ways, necessary. It seeks to reclaim pedestrian movement while offering hawkers some form of rehabilitation through designated vending zones.
The key mechanism is digital registration through city corporations. Hawkers would be officially registered, assigned a designated zone, and required to pay registration fees and monthly rent.
If implemented honestly, this could generate public revenue, reduce encroachment, and create a more orderly arrangement for both vendors and pedestrians.
Our interviews and FGDs repeatedly found one demand that cut across many vendors, association leaders, and hawker-rights activists: Some form of official licensing or registration with city corporations.
Why do vendors want registration? Because their illegal status currently traps them in a permanent cycle of extortion. As their businesses are technically unauthorized, political leaders, local musclemen, police, and, in some cases, city officials exploit that vulnerability.
These actors allow vendors to run their business on a designated spot in exchange for money. Often, paying influential actors is a survival mechanism for the poor. Vendors also described being pressured to join rallies, protests, and political programs to retain their spots. Some even said police sometimes pick them up to present them before the court in place of actual offenders.
Vendors also remain outside formal access to services such as water, electricity, and legal protection. This creates what our study found to be a deeply entrenched cycle: Illegal status leads to dependence, dependence leads to extortion, and extortion reproduces illegality.
Registration, in theory, could weaken this vicious cycle. If vendors are legally recognized, they can more easily challenge arbitrary extraction. They can apply for legal water and electricity connections rather than through illegal, overpriced channels.
Some vendors even argued that once they are legal and united, they themselves would resist the entry of new unregistered vendors outside designated spaces, because uncontrolled expansion harms their own business. Licensing could therefore help the authorities while also benefiting the vendors themselves.
But this is precisely where the policy becomes politically fragile. The greatest weakness of the current framework is not its administrative ambition, but its limited understanding of realities on the ground.
The document assumes that registration, zoning, and committee oversight will be enough. Yet our findings suggest that the real problem is not simply a lack of rules. It is the existence of deeply rooted informal power networks that already control who gets to sit where.
Many vendors have little formal education and may struggle with application procedures on their own. Our survey found that 45% of vendors had no formal education, and 81% had either no schooling or only basic and lower-secondary education.
In such a context, local brokers, musclemen, political leaders, and association middlemen may end up controlling the registration process itself. They may submit applications in vendors’ names, mediate access to licenses, and continue deciding who gets to occupy which space.
In other words, formal registration could become just another layer of control unless strong safeguards are in place. We have seen similar patterns in other urban registration systems, such as rickshaw and CNG permits, where powerful middlemen often capture the process, turning formal approval into another source of rent extraction.
Clause 19 of the policy says that no one can sit using another person’s license, but whether this rule matters depends entirely on honest enforcement. If the police remain corrupt, the underlying system will not change much.
Vendor associations could play an important role in the registration process because many vendors in Dhaka are connected through local and central association networks. But our interviews show that many of these associations are also influenced by political parties.
When a party comes to power, its labour leaders often try to take control of the larger vendor associations, which then shape the smaller local ones. If the same political networks that currently benefit from informal control also dominate the registration process, the new policy may end up reinforcing patronage instead of reducing it.
There is, however, one potentially transformative feature in the policy. Our study found that vending is overwhelmingly male-dominated: Around 97% of vendors are men. Clause 23 of the policy, which reserves at least 30% of spaces in each zone for women and persons with disabilities, could open a new avenue of income generation for groups that remain excluded from many public economic spaces.
This is especially important because women vendors face distinct challenges, including the absence of safe public toilets, greater exposure to harassment in crowded spaces, difficulty caring for children while working on the street, and weaker bargaining power against male-dominated extortion networks. If implemented seriously, this could become one of the policy’s most progressive outcomes.
Dhaka needs a hawker policy. But it does not need a policy that only redraws space on paper while leaving the old extortion networks untouched. The challenge is political rather than simply administrative.
Unless registration is transparent, enforcement is fair, and party-linked intermediaries are prevented from capturing the process, the same informal rulers of the footpath will survive under a new legal language.
The government is right to move beyond endless evictions. But a workable policy must recognize one hard truth: Hawkers are not the only actors on the footpath. A whole political economy is sitting there with them.
Md Ashikur Rahman is Research Associate, BIGD and Md Kamruzzaman is Research Coordinator, BIGD.
