Embodied Labour and Invisible Rights: Food Street Vendors in the City

By Aashi and Gargi

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While walking through the streets of Bangalore, you stumble upon a variety of local food vendors selling everything from coconuts to fruits, dosas to pao bhaji, pani puri to jhal muri. They form an important part of the city’s economy and culture, providing nourishment without making you empty your pockets. Street food is a form of urban infrastructure that sustains everyday life, especially for those who rely on affordable, quick meals to navigate long working hours in the city. While the city romanticises the experiences of street food and white-collar workers sitting in AC offices envy their supposed earnings, street vendors battle the heat of harsh sunny days, the perils of heavy rains, the incessant sound of traffic, and the constant threat of eviction. 

The struggles of street vendors remain invisible from the city narratives, which focus on promoting the culture of overcharged 10-minute delivery services instead of highlighting the ones who sit on city streets from morning to night to earn a livelihood in the IT capital of the country, where inequalities persist, and the poorest remain an afterthought of political schemes. This contrast reveals how the modern city privileges digitised, corporate food systems as symbols of progress while treating local food economies as backward, highlighting the classed nature of urban policies. 

Informality and Invisibility

Street food vendors are part of the informal economy, meaning they lack access to employment benefits such as a fixed income, social security, health insurance, and paid holidays. Their working hours are long, and their earnings are significantly affected by everyday uncertainties of weather, evictions, customer footfall, etc. Informality here is structural since the city benefits from cheap labour and affordable food without assuming responsibility for the workers who provide it. 

Deccan Herald’s report on the issue states that according to a survey conducted by BBMP in 2024, there are approximately 27,000 street vendors, but the actual number is more than a lakh, which showcases the deliberate erasure of their existence from city records. Such mismatch is a political act that determines who is visible in urban policy and who remains excluded from rights and protections. This erasure leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by authorities who only recognise vendors who have government-issued ID cards, but due to administrative delays, the ID cards haven’t been issued to the majority of the vendors. Recognition, therefore, becomes a tool of control, and despite their imminent visibility on the streets, their invisibility from records renders them disposable.  

There have been multiple reports of vendors being evicted without any prior notice, which highlights that cities don’t recognise embodied claim over space by the very people who provide essential services. Moreover, the goods of the vendors are often damaged during the evictions, which causes both financial and emotional loss. These evictions expose the unequal politics of urban space, where informal workers have to constantly justify their right to occupy public streets. When vendors are displaced, it disrupts neighbourhood food networks and the social relationships built around everyday transactions, revealing how food practices shape public space, urban sociality, and the livelihoods of thousands who are excluded from accessing the city equitably.

Gender and Caste Vulnerabilities

If street vendors are made invisible in urban policy, women vendors experience a deeper form of invisibility shaped by gender and caste. Research shows that informal occupations like street vending require little formal education, which makes them accessible to migrants and those with limited economic resources. However, this accessibility should not be mistaken for empowerment. Women experience the vulnerabilities of the informal sector more intensely within a patriarchal social structure. They are largely concentrated in selling perishable goods such as fruits, vegetables, and flowers. These goods involve high physical labour and low profit margins, increasing economic risk. ISEC Policy Brief in Bangalore reflects that over 98 per cent of women street vendors belonged to the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and other minority communities. This data reveals that street vending is not simply a livelihood choice but is structured by caste and class inequalities.

Food vending also reflects the gendered division of labour. Many women enter street food businesses because cooking is seen as a “natural” feminine skill learned within the household. In family-run stalls, women often prepare food while men manage finances and customer interactions. Some women hesitate to speak about the business in the absence of their husbands, suggesting limited ownership and decision-making power. In certain cases, women perform food preparation at home without wages, rendering their labour economically invisible. 

Inequality in Access

Street vending further blurs the boundary between domestic and public work. The flexibility of informal work allows women to balance income generation with caregiving responsibilities. However, this flexibility produces a double burden. Women remain responsible for childcare, eldercare, and household labour while simultaneously managing long hours on the street. Mobility is also restricted. Unlike male vendors who migrate or travel freely for work, women’s movement is often shaped by social expectations and safety concerns. 

Basic infrastructure deepens inequality. Access to sanitation remains a major challenge, especially for women dealing with menstruation, pregnancy, or other health conditions. Many vending locations expose women to pollution, traffic risks, and harsh weather conditions. Financial precarity compounds this vulnerability. Women vendors rarely access bank loans due to procedural barriers, illiteracy, and lack of collateral. Instead, they often rely on informal lenders who may charge high interest or resort to coercive practices. Although the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 mandates representation of women in Town Vending Committees, implementation rarely guarantees meaningful participation. Formal recognition exists on paper, but active inclusion remains limited.

Digital Economies vs Local Economies

As digital platforms reshape urban food economies, street vendors face new forms of exclusion. Food delivery apps operate through commission-based systems that increase final prices through service and delivery charges. Street food, when accessed directly, remains affordable precisely because it bypasses these intermediaries. Many small vendors lack the digital literacy, packaging infrastructure, or financial margin to participate in app-based systems. Those who do participate must absorb high commissions, reducing already thin profits. As a result, digital food economies privilege standardised, platform-based businesses while marginalising informal vendors who cannot meet technological requirements. The city increasingly associates progress with digitised convenience, while embodied, street-based food cultures are treated as outdated.

Street vendors are not temporary occupants of public space; they are central to how the city feeds itself. Yet their contribution is rarely acknowledged in planning, policy, or popular narratives. The everyday affordability and accessibility of street food depend on workers who operate without security, protection, or recognition. Understanding informality as a structural condition rather than a personal shortcoming shifts the focus from blaming vendors to questioning urban systems. 

Women street vendors, especially those from marginalised caste and class backgrounds, stand at the intersection of multiple inequalities that shape who can claim space, dignity, and economic stability in the city. If urban progress is measured only through digitisation, infrastructure, and corporate expansion, then large sections of essential workers remain excluded from its definition. The real question is not whether street vendors belong in the city, but whether the city is willing to recognise their labour, protect their rights, and include them in its vision of the future.