India’s street food paradox: Cleaner cities, but where do vendors go?

Every morning at around 8:30, Vijay Raut starts selling his cutting chai in Mahim, Mumbai. Taxi drivers stop for a glass. Construction workers come for a quick cuppa before work. Over the seven years he has been selling tea here, employees from a nearby bank have grown to know him well, and made him the regular supplier of tea, twice a day.

For the past month and a half, however, his biggest problem has been finding a place to sell tea. The ramshackle wooden structure from which Raut operated was taken away by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) during its recent enforcement drive tackling illegal pavement encroachment.

“I eventually got it back after paying a fine of Rs 1,100 apart from bearing the cost of transporting it,” says Raut. But he is afraid of putting it back up. The tea, however, has not disappeared. Nor have his customers, who still need their morning chai. “Now I carry tea in a flask, serving customers for a limited period,” he says. Raut’s wife is eight months pregnant.


His father is in intensive care. He has regular customers. But the structure that housed his business is no longer secure because his business is, at the end of the day, illegal. Therein lies a bizarre paradox playing out across cities, from Mumbai to Bengaluru to Thiruvananthapuram. Street food vendors occupy an uneasy place in India’s cities: essential to everyday life, but with little clout.

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They are housed on footpaths, which are being reclaimed for pedestrians. They also carry a reputation for being dirty, which has made them an obvious target of food safety drives. The story of Raut and many like him exposes the weakness of a system that has allowed vendors to operate without secure spaces, basic infrastructure and consistent oversight. While cities are trying to make public spaces cleaner and safer, they may be undermining small businesses and affordable food networks for millions. Solving this is critical to designing an inclusive, clean and equitable urban landscape.

BIG PLATE

India has one of the world’s richest street food traditions, ranging from vada pav, medu vada and bhel to golgappa, kebabs to chaat. Street food is cheap, accessible and deeply tied to the cultural identity of cities. For millions, street food is not an occasional indulgence. It is breakfast before a train, a vada pav between shifts, dosa on the way to work, a sandwich at lunchtime, noodles after a late shift, or cutting chai between two meetings.

For workers, students, taxi drivers and commuters living on tight budgets, street food solves two problems at once—it is affordable and accessible. It is also an enormous informal economy. The National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) said in 2021 that “10 million vendors in India make up a thriving street vendor market estimated to be at around Rs 8,000 crore daily”.

For comparison, Jubilant FoodWorks, one of India’s biggest restaurant companies, reported revenues of Rs 9,512 crore for FY26, which works out to around Rs 26 crore per day. While that establishes the scale of the street food market, it also underlines a key issue. The informal nature of the ecosystem means these vendors work outside the system. That has positives for those who grab grub at these joints, as prices don’t have to factor in compliance. As architect and urban planner Chandrashekhar Prabhu says, “The moment you put them in the formal sector, they have to pay rent, taxes, electricity and water charges, which makes them expensive. The moment they become expensive, they will not be catering to the kind of economic strata they are supposed to cater to.”

NEEDED: CLEANLINESS

Food safety infra is rarely built into the price either.

There are genuine hygiene risks with street food. Lolly Mukesh Jain, professor in the department of microbiology, KJ Somaiya College of Science and Commerce, Mumbai, says street food risks come from contamination, microbial multiplication and survival of microorganisms.

Unsafe water, raw ingredients, hands, utensils, insects, dust and dirty surfaces can introduce contamination. Cooked foods such as rice, gravies, dairy products and chutneys become particularly vulnerable when kept for long periods at room temperature. But Jain says the location of food is not what determines safety. With basic infrastructure and training, she says, a well- designed street food stall can achieve food safety standards comparable to a small restaurant.

A street food stall does not need a restaurant-style kitchen. It needs potable water, soap-based handwashing facilities, clean utensils and surfaces, separation of raw and cooked food and temperature control. India’s food safety regulator, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), already has hygiene requirements for small food operators and street food vendors. Its Clean Street Food programme focuses on training and capacity-building alongside regulation. From April 1 this year, FSSAI’s revised licensing framework also raised the annual turnover threshold for basic food business registration from Rs 12 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore. In theory, this should reduce compliance costs for small businesses.

In 2025, FSSAI said it had worked with BMC to train more than 4,000 street vendors, self-help groups and mid-day meal providers, as part of an initiative targeting 10,000 vendors across Mumbai. Vendors who are registered under the Street Vendors Act through municipal corporations or town vending committees are deemed registered under the FSSAI framework, subject to hygiene and sanitary requirements. But most of this remains on paper.

WHOSE SPACE IS IT?

There is another unresolved question: Who has the legal right to occupy public space? Prabhu points out, “Footpaths are for pedestrians, not vendors.” He talks about spaces like Nariman Point in Mumbai which, when it was planned, did not have any space for vendors. “Then a decision was taken to keep some space behind the Air India building for people to have street food.” But such places are rare, and vendors across India end up occupying pedestrian space.

The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, does provide a framework for recognising and regulating vendors. “But Mumbai’s street-vending system is still struggling to fully implement it,” says a person close to vendor licensing, who didn’t want to come on the record. Queries sent to BMC and FSSAI went unanswered. Simply put, regulation without infrastructure can push vendors further into informality, not eliminate problems.

LOOK EAST FOR ANSWERS

Italian chef Adriano Baldassarre, who has a Michelin-starred restaurant, Tordomatto, in Rome, has fond memories of Indian street food. He spent nearly 12 years in India and also worked as a private chef for the Ambani family. He recalls eating chaat on Delhi’s streets and appreciates their authenticity. His most vivid memory is being served samosas in a newspaper.

Hygiene remains a concern. But for Baldassarre, the answer is not to eliminate street food. Vendors, he believes, “can be better supported to improve hygiene while retaining the authenticity and taste that make Indian street food distinctive”.

Is there a way out? Looking East would be a good starting point. Across most of Asia, from Japan and China to Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore, street food is an important part of the urban fabric. Even Singapore, with limited real estate and high cleanliness quotient, did not eliminate its hawker culture in the name of hygiene. It instead moved vendors into regulated, purpose-built centres with water, drainage, waste management and other basic facilities.

As Andrew Tam wrote in an article in Gastronomica, “Hawking in Singapore was initially seen as a nuisance that had to be tolerated and later regulated by both the colonial administration and newly independent government. The relocation of hawkers to centralized food centers marked the imposition of order and hygiene onto a squalid industry.”

Malaysia has similarly developed hawker centres and food courts, while Vietnam has experimented with designated areas and food safety oversight. Street food in many of these cities is a legit tourist attraction. So much so that the purveyor of great grub, the Michelin Guide, has a specific recognition, Bib Gourmand, for such eateries. Michelin says the approach demonstrates that “quality is not defined by the setting, but by the food itself”, and that exceptional cuisine can be found “from street stalls and neighbourhood eateries to some of the world’s most renowned restaurants”. Singapore’s hawker culture, it says, is a strong example.

The reality is that the demand for street food is not going away. India will continue to eat on its streets. The question is whether its vendors will still have a place there, says Baldassarre. India cannot simply copy global models. Its streets are more crowded, its vending economy more informal and its history different. But the comparison raises the possibility that regulation does not necessarily have to mean disappearance.

India’s challenge is therefore larger than ensuring a chai seller, sandwich maker, or noodle vendor has a licence. “It is whether the city can create a system in which street food is safer without making the people who sell it invisible,” says Baldassarre.

SURVIVAL MODE

For now, vendors are in survival mode. Vinita Shinde once sold Chinese food from a makeshift stall in Dadar in Central Mumbai, working from morning till 11 at night. On a single stove, she prepared noodles, manchurian and fried rice, tossing vegetables and tur ning out orders. She was the only earning member in her family. Her routine has changed over the past few weeks: “I am preparing a few dishes closer home and serving customers for just two-three hours.”

Her business continues, but at a much smaller scale. Then there is Manjunath Shirodkar, a sandwich seller from Prabhadevi in south Mumbai. For years, he sat at a familiar spot facing the main road. “Now I prepare chutney and vegetables at home, carry them to the old location, serve my regular customers and leave in a jiffy,” says Shirodkar. The vendors make less money because they don’t have the space they used to. To meet household expenses, including his wife’s medical costs, Shirodkar has start- ed delivering vegetables and milk in the morning and evening.

A coconut-water seller near Dadar has found another workaround. After being moved from his regular spot, he now brings a few coconuts and sits inside a nearby shoe shop, where regular clients come looking for him. He charges a premium, but customers continue to buy. For years, say vendors, enforcement was something they negotiated around. Carts would be seized, fines paid and businesses resumed. Some say they routinely paid enforcement officials to keep selling from their spots. Now, they say, it feels different.