A friend who’s always hunting for the best street food recently messaged me in a flurry: “Wait… are they really putting warning labels on jalebis and samosas? What about nihari? Chapli kababs?” I was halfway through a plate of chole kulche at a cart near the PHD Chambers in Hauz Khas when I read it.
The crunch froze mid‑chew not because of the food, but because of the thought that this man’s livelihood might hinge on how headlines framed an advisory.
Within days, the Union Health Ministry stepped in. On 15 July, it clarified there was no directive to label street snacks like samosas or jalebis. Instead, the advisory recommended placing “oil-and-sugar awareness boards” in office cafeterias, public lobbies, and meeting rooms to nudge healthier eating. The ministry called the media reports about warning labels “misleading, incorrect, and baseless”. The Press Information Bureau (PIB) echoed that no labels would be mandated on traditional Indian snacks, making it clear the advisory did not target India’s rich street food culture.
Street Food and Public Perception
The contrast between what was feared and what was formally said captures the yawning gap between policy intent and public imagination, one that can ripple through vendor stalls across Delhi’s streets.
That confusion matters.
In Delhi, most street-food vendors are migrants forged in caste, region, and necessity running stalls in crowded neighbourhoods like Malviya Nagar, Sarojini Nagar, Lajpat Nagar, Rajinder Nagar, or Chandni Chowk.
They work long hours, navigating extortion, eviction and social exclusion, preserving a living through food.
Migration, Caste, and the Taste of Home
The market at Rajinder Nagar hums with flavours brought from Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala—and elsewhere, chain migration networks that also fund access. These vendors entered the trade through social networks that offered food, shelter and capital to new arrivals.
Their food is regional identity in edible form: Dabeli, bhelpuri, kachoris, momos, puri sabzi, and kebabs that taste like home everywhere they settle. Apart from the street flavours, they also bring their own origin story, caste lineage and daily struggle.
The identity also determines precarity: marginalised caste vendors lack symbolic capital and face eviction easily in Delhi’s (and other city’s) hostile grids of urban hygiene and policy bias.
The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 was meant to flip that script. It promised periodic surveys, vending zones, certificates, and Town Vending Committees (TVCs) with at least 40 percent vendor representation, including women. Yet, across Delhi too many TVCs remain inactive; zones are unmarked; certificates don’t translate into security.
Since April alone, nearly 20,000 stalls have been removed from Delhi’s streets many belonging to certificate-holding vendors.
That contradiction, evicting those the law protects, exposes a staggering failure in implementation.
Vending, Urban Planning & Displacement
In Saket, around D and E blocks, the footpaths transform by midday into bustling food courts. Office workers, hospital staff, delivery boys, start-up folks, and day labourers all line up for rice plates, chole kulche, and idlis steaming in steel containers. Residents say there’s no space to walk. But for vendors, it’s the only way to survive.
That’s the conflict. Not just footpath versus food, but planning versus promises, survival versus symmetry. And Delhi hasn’t yet figured out how to hold both.
In Lajpat Nagar, Sarojni Market or Jama Masjid, redevelopment pushes vendors out in the name of heritage or cleanliness, often ignoring older vendor histories that survive there for generations.
Often even after earning vending certificates, vendors recount harassment during anti-encroachment drives—the Municipal Corporation of Delhi often demolishes their carts or the shop. Many mobile vendors keep their carts small because it is easy to carry and run away with when they get harassed by the authorities.
The conflict isn’t just about pavement space. It’s also about who gets erased first. Across Delhi, evictions disproportionately affect Purvanchali vendors, many of them marginalised caste Hindus or Muslims who bring with them foods shaped by memory and migration: litti chokha, kebab rolls, nihari, jhalmuri.
They are displaced not just physically, but symbolically pushed to the edges of the city’s gaze. Their food may be romanticised as “authentic street fare,” but they themselves are rarely afforded dignity.
Delhi is home to millions of working-class migrants who come chasing work, only to be absorbed into the unplanned backbone of the informal economy. They build the kitchens of homes and hospitals, lay bricks and cables, sell samosas and chai. Yet, the space they occupy on footpaths, in policy, in imagination—remains uncertain.
And then come the seasons. When Delhi scorches at 48 degrees, or floods knee-deep in July rain, or freezes on a January morning, it is the vendors who endure first and the worst.
With no shade, no rest, no shelter, their incomes plummet, some reporting 60 to 80 percent losses in extreme weather.
Many are women, balancing tiffin boxes, hot griddles, caste hierarchies, misogyny, harassment, and the weight of entire families. They stay because there is nowhere else to go.
Caste, Dignity and Right to the City
That anxiety at the chole kulche stand wasn’t just about food; it opened a window into what’s broken. It cracked open something deeper: how fragile survival is when policy, press, and public perception collide. Real reform must go far beyond clarifying advisory misreads.
Vendors braced for imagined health warnings on samosa and kebabs, even before any such labels existed.
Their anxiety came not from actual regulation, but from fear of being targeted, of livelihoods erased. Delhi needs active enforcement of the 2014 Act: regularly updated vendor surveys, legal recognition of all sellers, mapped vending zones, and functional TVCs that include vendors and women in decision-making roles.
City planning must also integrate these realities and systemic bias must end. Vendors operate within caste and migration hierarchies; many are low-caste migrants whose food and labour are both central to Delhi’s (and other cities) identity and marginalised in policy. Inclusion should mean dignity, access to credit and sanitation, legal aid, space and celebration of their cultural value, not constant repositioning as encroachers.
Delhi’s street food is about flavour, lived migration, caste identity, struggle, and resilience.
Reform can’t just polish headlines or sanitise chole kulche stalls. It must ground the city in policies that respect lives behind the food, not just traffic flow. Street vendors deserve clarity, dignity and a place in the story of a city tale.
(Sadaf Hussain is an author, chef, food writer, podcaster and two-time TedX speaker, who was among the top 8 on MasterChef India in 2016. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)