India, June 27 -- West Bengal saw a flurry of hawker-eviction drives after a new government came to power in May after the Assembly elections, with bulldozers deployed in several public places. Left parties actively protested against the eviction drives. Recently, former chief minister Mamata Banerjee also led a protest rally. The issue, however, is not new - such drives have occurred under both the Left and TMC governments in the state, and in other states too. But no government has likely adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards street vending. Hawkers do business on State-owned land without legal title and without paying taxes - this is the justification forwarded for eviction. But, in a country like ours - with limited formal sector employment and weak social security - the real question is whether the State has the moral authority to deprive people of their means of livelihood. Several court verdicts, as well as the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, acknowledge the need to balance the letter of the law against people's right to earn a livelihood. What are the different policy mechanisms to do this? Market auction is one option. When a public resource becomes scarce and individual actions generate significant externalities, the privatisation of public property can be efficient. Following this logic, one might argue that auctioning government land to the highest bidder is efficient, since the winner, by definition, is the person who can extract the most value from it - their expected lifetime income from the plot must be at least as large as their bid and government can use the bid money to compensate the evicted hawkers. The critical problem is that the urban strips we are discussing - a few square metres outside a railway station or along a busy footpath - are unlikely to attract major entrepreneurs. Rehabilitating the evicted hawkers ina different space is another option. The problem here is that returns in street vending come solely from the location. Governments have previously tried relocating evicted vendors to remote sites, only to find vendors unwilling to move. The existing approach of different governments and the Street Vending Act, 2014 is to go for spatial rationing - creating hawking and non-hawking zones. The 2014 Act proposes to form a Town Vending Committee which will balance the interests of hawkers and pedestrians through mediation. While, in theory, this approach can work, it disregards the dynamic nature of the problem - new hawkers keep coming to the streets in search of livelihood. A decentralised solution is a possible approach, whereby new public spaces with significant footfall are created to accommodate new hawkers. But the perennial need for space complicates this. Periodic re-allotment of the same space through lottery can facilitate fairness in allocation, but this too comes with its own set of problems - the most prominent being what happens to hawkers who incur costs to set up their shop at a location and then, later, lose the space in the lottery. The central problem in the hawker debate is urban congestion. But governments have to think beyond spatial rationing as it is conventionally understood, and the brutal eviction drives. There seems no alternative to better planned cities and creating more opportunities in periurban and rural areas to check rural to urban migration in search of livelihoods....