The Vendor Who Knew the Supreme Court Order Better Than the Officer Did

How We Met

I almost didn't get this interview.

A day before we were supposed to meet, I ran into someone from the National Federation outside their office and mentioned I'd been trying to reach the union head. He pulled out his phone, made a call, handed it to me. I had two minutes to explain myself. We fixed a time.

The next morning, I got a message: he'd come back from the mosque, started changing clothes, and the dizziness hit. He couldn't receive calls. He spent part of the day in bed.

We met the day after that instead, at a small space near the market he's spent years fighting to protect. He poured tea before I'd even set my recorder down. Then he started talking, and I could tell immediately that whatever I'd prepared to ask, the conversation was going to go wherever he took it.

What a Vending Zone Actually Is

I want to explain something about the physical space we were sitting in, because it matters for everything else.

The strip of market near Jayaprakash Udyan — the place local vendors call the Buddha Market, which sits alongside what was previously called Ambedkar Market — didn't appear on its own. It exists because of a process: survey, measurement, submission to the vending committee, approval, agreement. The union head has the paperwork. He showed me a copy.

The Bodh Gaya Town Vending Committee was, at the time of its formation, the first of its kind in Bihar. The 2014 Street Vendors Act mandated these committees across all towns — at least 40 percent of members had to be vendors themselves. A committee was formed here. Meetings happened. Zones were surveyed. Around 250 vendors got identity cards.

"Bihar's first vending committee formed right here in Bodh Gaya." — Field notes, February 2024

Then the officer who'd been calling those meetings was transferred. His replacement called two meetings. The one after that has called none.

This is what bureaucratic stalling looks like from inside it: not an outright refusal, just a calendar that never fills up, meetings that never get scheduled, cards that never get issued, a committee that exists on paper and nowhere else.

Three Officers, One Decade

The union has navigated three executive officers in recent years. The first — who was there during the initial surveys and demarcations — was by their account genuinely engaged. Coordinates were recorded. An agreement was signed. Spaces were assigned. He left.

The second called a couple of meetings, kept things minimally functional. He left.

The third arrived about a year before I came to Bodh Gaya. Under him, the vending committee hasn't met once. When I asked what happened when vendors brought this up, the union head said the officer simply doesn't respond. Not hostile exactly. Just absent.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the law is unambiguous. The High Court issued a judgment: identity cards must be issued within 15 days of application. The Supreme Court order exists. The state government in 2017 issued a directive that vendors cannot be removed without alternative arrangements being made first.

The officer knows all of this. So do the vendors. The standoff isn't really about ignorance of the law.

"When they know we know the law, they can't just dismiss us anymore. But they can wait us out." — Field notes, February 2024

The Year the Law Arrived

Before 2014, the union existed but had no ground to stand on. Officers could scatter vendors with a word. There was nothing to cite, no committee to demand a hearing from, no documentation to wave at a policeman who'd decided to clear the footpath for a VIP visit.

The Street Vendors Act changed the texture of these encounters. Not immediately, not completely — but the union head is clear that something shifted. He started going to meetings at the district level armed with the text of the law. He affiliating the local union with a national federation gave access to people who had litigated these cases in courts. The general secretary of the national body came to Bodh Gaya, met with the district magistrate, explained the framework.

"We came to know that there is a law for us. We got strength from that."

Before the law: if you sat down with an official, he'd raise his voice and send you out.

After: the official knows you know the order exists. He knows a High Court can be petitioned. The dynamic doesn't become friendly, but it becomes different.

The Hotel Argument

At some point I mentioned that I'd spoken to hotels and monasteries in Bodh Gaya — and that several of them had told me commercial activity near the temple zone was a problem. That the space should be cleared, the vendors moved further out, the aesthetic cleaned up for international pilgrims.

He didn't get angry. He got specific.

There had been a meeting, he told me. A hotel near the market sent a representative who raised objections to e-rickshaws clustering near the entrance, to vendors blocking sight lines. The union head's response was direct: "Give everyone jobs. If you have the capacity to bring people into the formal system, do it. Don't blame the people who are working with what they have."

The economic argument he makes is one I've heard from vendors in other pilgrimage cities, but he makes it with particular precision. The informal vendor sells a mala for ₹100. The hotel gift shop sells the same mala for ₹1,000. The tourist who can buy at street prices and spend the difference on something else leaves Bodh Gaya with a better memory of it. That memory travels. "We are also making this place's name."

The hotels want the vendors gone because the vendors undercut them. This is not a planning dispute. It's a market dispute dressed in the language of heritage and aesthetics.

What the Committee Actually Requires

The vending committee composition is worth spelling out because it keeps getting ignored in practice.

By law: at least 40 percent vendor representation, including a woman member and a member with disability. The Bodh Gaya committee has seven members, assembled by the book — the union is represented, a woman is included, a person with disability is included. The officer chairs it.

In the period of active meetings — two or three years ago — the committee set the fee structure, reviewed the spatial plan, worked through disputes. The fee that was proposed and discussed: somewhere between ₹62 and ₹72 per month, as per Supreme Court guidelines. Not arbitrary, not at the officer's discretion. Set through the committee process.

Under the current officer, none of this is happening. There is an annual fee being collected — around ₹1,500 to ₹2,000 per year — but the vending committee hasn't sanctioned it in a proper meeting. Vendors pay because they have to. The committee exists to give them a seat at the table where these things are decided, and the table hasn't been set in over a year.

Before NHF, After NHF

The union had existed informally for years before the national federation arrived. What the federation brought was connection — to other cities fighting the same battles, to lawyers who had litigated vending rights cases, to a national leadership that could take issues to ministerial level when local administration refused to budge.

It also brought information. The general secretary came personally. Explained the law in detail. Met with officials. Made the local union's presence legible in a way that a group of footpath traders complaining to a municipal officer couldn't quite achieve on their own.

Now, when a police constable says move, the vendors don't move. They explain that the zone is demarcated, the agreement is signed, the nagar panchayat has recorded the coordinates. They say: here is the document. The constable — usually — backs off.

Not always. But usually.

"Before, we moved because we had nothing in writing. Now we have everything in writing. Now we don't have to move." — Field notes, February 2024

What I Came Away With

The union head answered his phone twice during our conversation, poured more tea than either of us drank, and at one point asked the person in the adjacent space to bring over something warm. He'd been unwell the day before. He looked tired.

At the end, I asked what the biggest remaining obstacle was.

He was quiet for a second. Then: "The officer above follows the law. What happens at the local level is the local administration's own logic. The order is there from above. But here — they do what they want."

That gap — between the order and its implementation, between the law on paper and the meeting that never gets called — is the whole story of street vending governance in a small pilgrimage town. The law is better than it was. The committees exist. The documentation exists. And still, a vendor who has held the same spot for twenty years has to wonder, every few months, whether the next officer rotation will undo everything the previous one agreed to.

He knows the Supreme Court order by heart. He's cited it to officers who hadn't read it. That shouldn't be remarkable. Somehow, it still is.