CURRENT AFFAIRS

Description

Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs launched a scheme PM Street Vendor's Atma Nirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) to empower Street Vendors by not only extending loans to them, but also for their holistic development and economic upliftment.

Who are street vendors?

Anyone who doesn’t have a permanent shop is considered a street vendor. According to government estimates, street-vending accounts for 14 per cent of the total (non-agricultural) urban informal employment in the country.

There are an estimated 50-60 lakh street vendors in India, with the largest concentrations in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad. Most of them are migrants who typically work for 10–12 hours every day on average.

Street vendors represent a very important constituent of the urban informal economy and play a significant role in ensuring availability of the goods and services at affordable rates at the door-step of the city dwellers. 

Issues faced:

·         Licence caps are unrealistic in most cities — Mumbai for example, has a ceiling of around 15,000 licences as against an estimated 2.5 lakh vendors. This means most vendors hawk their goods illegally, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation and extortion by local police and municipal authorities. 

·         Often, local bodies conduct eviction drives to clear the pavements of encroachers, and confiscate their goods. Fines for recovery are heavy.

Over the years, street vendors have organised themselves into trade unions and associations, and numerous NGOs have started working for them.

The National Hawker Federation (NHF) is a federation of 1,400 street vendor organisations and trade unions that has a presence in 28 states.

The National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), which pushed to get the landmark Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act of 2014 through Parliament, is working to provide hygiene and social distancing training to cooked food vendors in the wake of the pandemic.

Salient features of PM SVANidhi scheme

The COVID-19 pandemic and consequent lockdowns have adversely impacted the livelihoods of street vendors. They usually work with a small capital base and might have consumed the same during the lockdown. Therefore, there is an urgent need to provide credit for working capital to street vendors to resume their business.

·         The scheme is a Central Sector Scheme i.e. fully funded by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs with the following objectives:

(i)                  To facilitate working capital loan up to `10,000;

(ii)                To incentivize regular repayment; and

(iii)              To reward digital transactions

·         The scheme will help formalize the street vendors with above objectives and will open up new opportunities to this sector to move up the economic ladder.

·         The Scheme is available for beneficiaries belonging to only those States/UTs which have notified Rules and Scheme under Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014. Beneficiaries from Meghalaya, which has its own State Street Vendors Act may, however, participate.

·         Salient features:

(i)                  Initial working capital of up to `10,000/-

(ii)               Interest subsidy on timely/ early repayment @ 7%

(iii)              Monthly cash-back incentive on digital transactions

(iv)              Higher loan eligibility on timely repayment of the first loan.