Striving for Livelihood and Urban Space A Study of Street Vendors of Pokhara

Abstract

This study was undertaken with the general objective of assessing the living condition of street vendors of Pokhara metropolitan City and the contribution of street vending in making their livelihood. The specific objectives were to examine the reasons for these people being engaged in street vending in Pokhara City and to investigate the vendors’ striving for getting subsistence livelihoods in the context of increased rigidness of local authorities towards them. Embedded with the thematic notions of urban anthropology conceptually, theoretically and methodologically, this study was guided by the concepts like livelihood and informal sector. Right to the city has been used as the main theoretical guideline. Literatures related to these conceptual and theoretical bases as well as others, which were undertaken on and about street vending in and out of Nepal have been reviewed during this study. Methodologically, this study was carried out in main market centers of Pokhara Metropolitan City, namely Mahendrapool, Chipledhunga, and Prithivi Chowk including Buspark. These areas were purposefully selected for the data collection of this study. This is a study based on qualitative research tradition. Within this tradition, this study made use of the basic elements of ethnographic research. In terms of research design, this study is based on exploratory and descriptive research designs. There have been no documented /official records on the total number of street vendors in Pokhara Metropolitan City as the metropolis authority has classified this activity as an illegal act. However, street vending is quite a common practice in the major market centers of Pokhara and all those street vendors formed the universe of this study. Thus, for the qualitative research, I had selected 11 woman street vendors as the main informants of this study by adopting purposive sampling procedure. Besides, four informants were chosen purposively for case studies and additional two informants for key-informants interview. Basically, this research has been based on primary types of qualitative data collected from the ethnographic fieldwork undertaken mainly by making use of the techniques of in-depth interviewing with the informants, key-informants and participant observation. To be precise, fruits selling women as street vendors in Pokhara were main sources of primary data. Some important secondary data were also gathered through the review of published and unpublished documents available in libraries, official records of Pokhara Metropolis office, and personal collections. Data analysis followed a kind of cyclical pattern of data collection, recording, analyzing, and returning to the field to collect more data. During data analysis, at first I collected data from participant observation and interviews. After that I transcribed all of those recorded data in Nepali by using computer software named VLC media player. Then each of the transcripts was translated into English and the translated data ware coded in English to generate themes and categories. Finally, those themes and categories were analyzed descriptively. There are several reasons for which the women street vendors have been engaged in street vending in Pokhara. The most important reason that has been discovered is that street vending can be started with much lower investment. Besides this, lack of appropriate alternative, lack of educational qualification, more personal freedom etc. are other reasons. Therefore, street vending can be a good option to avoid business insecurities. Metropolis authority has been trying to prevent them from appearing on the streets but they are not in a mood to give up. In the streets, they have to strive against a number challenges which are posed by metropolis authority and their police, their customers and other shop keepers. As evident in their stories, they have been continually striving against these challenges for generating income. Their incessant striving for some of the urban space for undertaking vending practices has been going on and on. Such tireless engagement of the street vendors in coping with the adversities created by the local authority, local entrepreneurs, businesspersons and their associations also gives an unspoken or indirect message that the vendors have been claiming their right over urban space.