Yesterday, on a walk I take most evenings, a few familiar spots were empty. Most striking was the absence of four vendors with whom I usually, if not always, shared a nod: the paan shop by the traffic signal, the fruit cart on the way to the park, the dosa cart outside the neighbourhood eatery, and the momo stall at the corner. They had disappeared before – a wedding back home, a week of heavy rain, or another spell when the ward office grew ‘particular’ about the footpath. But those departures usually came with a promise of return: a cart left behind, a folded tarpaulin, or some other sign that business would resume the next day.This time, there was nothing. It did not take long to connect the absences to the Supreme Court’s ruling of 19 June recognising the right to safe access to footpaths as a fundamental right under Article 21, read with Article 19(1)(d), and to the anti-encroachment drives that soon followed in cities across India.The verdict itself did not concern vendors. Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz v. P. Ayyappan arose from the death of a five-year-old boy who was killed by a tanker while walking to school along a road without a footpath. A bench comprising P. S. Narasimha and A. S. Chandurkar held that safe pedestrian access is intrinsic to the right to life under Article 21 and that the right to walk must take precedence over vehicular movement. Notably, the judgment neither discusses street vendors nor mandates their eviction.Yet within a fortnight, city administrations had launched safe footpath campaigns invoking both the Court’s directions and, tellingly, the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, (2014) – a law enacted to protect vendors. Officials have described these exercises as relocation rather than eviction. In one such campaign, authorities maintained that only about a fifth of vendors operating along arterial roads were affected and that they would be accommodated elsewhere.This reasoning treats location as incidental to street vending, when, in reality, it is often its most valuable asset. A vendor who has spent years building a customer base at a traffic signal, outside a school, or near a residential neighbourhood does not experience an unspecified ‘elsewhere’ as an equivalent opportunity. Street vending is not simply the sale of goods from a movable cart. It is an economic activity shaped by the rhythms of a particular place and the relationships built with the people who pass through it every day. Unlike businesses imagined in models of perfectly competitive markets, where sellers can relocate with minimal consequences, the viability of street vending depends on the geography of demand. The value of a vending site lies not merely in the space it occupies but, in the community, pedestrian flows, and everyday routines that make that space economically viable. To relocate a vendor, therefore, is often to relocate the market itself.The jurisprudence has long anticipated this tension. In Bombay Hawkers’ Union v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985), the Supreme Court recognised that street hawking forms part of the constitutional freedom to practise a profession under Article 19(1)(g), while affirming that the state may reasonably regulate its exercise to protect pedestrians and ensure orderly use of public spaces. Later that year, in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, the court held that the right to livelihood is an integral component of the right to life under Article 21, reasoning that the right to life is rendered illusory if it excludes the means of sustaining it. Read together, these decisions did not establish competing constitutional claims but complementary ones i.e. the right to move safely through the city and the right to earn a livelihood within it. Both emerged from the Court’s expansive understanding of Article 21 as protecting the conditions necessary for a life of dignity.Also read: The Supreme Court Has Declared Walking a Fundamental Right. Will Governments Put People Over Cars?The present moment, therefore, is not evidence of a constitutional contradiction but of a constitutional challenge. The question is not whether one of these rights should prevail over the other, but whether governments can give effect to both. If the implementation of the right to safe pedestrian access results in the systematic displacement of street vendors without meaningful accommodation, the tension lies less in Article 21 itself than in the manner in which constitutional rights are being translated into urban governance.Parliament had already attempted to address this tension well before the Court’s latest intervention. The Street Vendors Act (2014) emerged from decades of litigation, advocacy, and organising by street vendors’ associations across the country. The efforts of Ela Bhatt and the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) are particularly remarkable, which challenged arbitrary confiscations and evictions and helped place vendors’ rights on the national policy agenda. The Act proceeds from a simple but important premise: street vendors are not trespassers to be periodically cleared away but workers whose livelihoods deserve legal protection. It recognises “natural markets”– long-standing vending clusters that have evolved organically – and provides that such areas should not ordinarily be declared no-vending zones. Before any eviction or relocation, authorities are required to conduct surveys, identify eligible vendors, and issue Certificates of Vending. The law also creates Town Vending Committees, with at least 40% representation from vendors and one-third women members, so that decisions about urban space are made with vendors rather than merely for them.More than a decade after the Act came into force, however, its implementation remains uneven across many states and cities. In several places, surveys have been delayed, vending zones remain inadequately notified, and vendor organisations have alleged that recent clearance drives have proceeded without complying with several procedural safeguards prescribed under the Act. If these concerns are borne out, the irony would be difficult to miss: a law enacted to secure the livelihoods of street vendors is increasingly being invoked in the course of removing them from the very spaces where those livelihoods were built.Representational image: Street vendors occupy a footpath at Lajpat Nagar, in New Delhi on June 27, 2026. Photo: PTI/Shahbaz Khan.There is a deeper constitutional conundrum follows. India’s rights jurisprudence has long assumed that Article 21 is capacious enough to accommodate competing claims without treating them as inherently irreconcilable. The challenge, however, lies not in constitutional doctrine but in constitutional implementation. When governments are called upon to reconcile competing rights, the burdens of accommodation are often borne by those with the least political, social, and economic agency. The street vendor’s claim is treated as one of accommodation – how much public space can be spared, under what conditions, and for how long – while the pedestrian’s claim, articulated in the language of the ‘general public’, is presented as an entitlement whose fulfilment admits little negotiation. That hierarchy is not prescribed by Article 21. It emerges from the institutional choices governments make about whose rights are treated as the starting point of urban planning and whose are addressed only after enforcement has begun.The asymmetry is reinforced by selective enforcement. Street vendors are rarely the only occupants of public space. The same footpaths cleared of handcarts often remain obstructed by illegally parked vehicles, construction debris, commercial spillovers, utility installations, or other encroachments that attract far less urgency from enforcement agencies. If the objective is genuinely to secure safe pedestrian access, constitutional consistency demands that public authorities confront all forms of obstruction with equal seriousness. When enforcement falls most swiftly on those whose livelihoods depend on occupying public space, while more powerful encroachments persist with relative impunity, the issue is no longer merely one of pedestrian safety. It becomes a question of equality before the law and of whose presence the city is ultimately organised to protect.This is not to deny that unsafe, unwalkable footpaths represent a serious and long-neglected failure of urban infrastructure and evidently, a threat to right to life. The problem lies in treating footpath as a finite resource over which pedestrians and street vendors must inevitably compete. The real failure is not constitutional but institutional: decades of urban planning that neglected to design cities capable of accommodating both.Representational image: Street vendors sleep on a handcart amid scorching summer heat, in Mumbai, Maharashtra on June 19, 2026. Photo: PTI.Successive governments failed to create designated vending zones, integrate informal markets into urban plans, or implement the participatory framework envisioned by the Street Vendors Act. The result is that the costs of these accumulated planning failures are now being transferred onto those with the least capacity to bear them.Other jurisdictions have approached this tension differently. In Durban, the busy Warwick Junction precinct, home to thousands of informal traders, faced redevelopment and large-scale eviction in the early 2000s. Instead of treating vendors as obstacles to urban planning, litigation supported by the Legal Resources Centre and planning initiatives led by Asiye eTafuleni helped redesign the precinct around the coexistence of traders and pedestrians. South African courts subsequently reinforced this approach by recognising that restrictions on informal trading must be consistent with constitutional guarantees of dignity and the freedom to trade. The lesson is not that South Africa has resolved the challenges of informality, but that it framed the constitutional question differently: not whether vendors and pedestrians could coexist, but how cities could be designed to make that coexistence possible.The reframing of these rights is available within India’s own legal architecture. The Street Vendors Act provides many of the institutional tools needed to reconcile mobility with livelihood – recognition of natural markets, participatory Town Vending Committees, mandatory surveys, and certificates of vending. What is missing is not law but the political will to implement such measures. A right to walk safely does not have to be purchased at the price of a right to earn a livelihood. It only appears that way if administrations choose the expedient solution over the equitable one, shifting the costs of decades of planning failures onto those least able to bear them.Swarati Sabhapandit is a faculty at Azim Premji University.