In Pakistan, we may not visualize a street vendor selling shirts through cashless payment or the delicious papri chaat from a food cart delivered through food panda or a fruit vendor using a solar panel for lighting his vehicle at night. Many of the Pakistanis remain nostalgic about their childhood experience of buying masaledar radish or their other favorite items from street vendors. The economic environment has evolved over the decades and rising prosperity has also impacted the shape and design of vending carts in the country. It is not unusual to see more colorful and efficiently made carts in major urban centers. However, one feature remains constant through this evolution, which is the fickleness of the legal status of street vending in Pakistan. The country is rapidly urbanizing with high rural to urban migration. Unskilled migrants and urban poor are making the robust base of street vending in urban Pakistan. Its resilience and scale are evident from the failure of frequent eviction campaigns by city authorities in eradicating street vending.
Government attitude remains more or less hostile towards street vending in many developing countries. And it is a matter of fact that even a liberal vending license regime may not be able to accommodate the consistent high flow of urban poor desirous for vending within spatial constraints of public spaces. City authorities are in a persistent bind of fixing new ceilings of vending licenses with urban expansion while warding off the unauthorized vendors with little success.
On the technological diffusion end, the initial mention of QR-based payment in Indonesia could be taken as the reference here. In recent years, Indonesia has witnessed the rapid adoption of QR-based cashless payment among millions of merchants across the country. Central Bank of Indonesia is even pursuing the street vendors to embrace the QR payment system. Warung Pintar, an Indonesian startup, has been able to partner with over 7,000 street vendors for the adoption of smart solutions including QR-based cashless payment.
In collaboration with the central government, Swiggy, India’s largest food delivery platform has launched an online delivery program for street food vendors across 125-cities. The program will cover around 36,000 registered food vendors. Musana Carts, a Ugandan social enterprise, has introduced an eco-friendly solar-powered cart for food vendors. With its modular design, the cart offers not only better operating viability, but has also transformed the untidy image of street food vending in Uganda.
However, in all the three mentioned cases, only licensed street vendors qualify for these technological offerings. Bestowing legal status upon street vendors will open up many vistas of technical ascendency and social mobility for street vendors. There are several precedents, where street vendors have witnessed a two to threefold rise in their profitability after the adoption of new technology or process. City authorities in Pakistan have to rethink the whole paradigm of street vending to make it viable for technology diffusion. The adoption of technological innovation will remain low among street vendors if they remain devoid of legal status. In a recent survey of street vendors in Islamabad, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) has found that less than 20% of street vendors are using smartphones due to lack of affordability.
There are around 300 licensed street vendors in Islamabad, making-up just 0.015% of its population. It is a given recipe of gross underinvestment in vending structure, resulting in a large number of untidy and inefficient carts roaming in the streets and markets of Islamabad. So far Pakistan has not been able to buck the global inclusion trend of technology diffusion among its street vendors. It will not only boost street livelihood in the country but will also accelerate the formalization process of the informal street entrepreneurs. Demography is not rescinding its pace in Urban Pakistan and denial of space to street vendors will not allow technology diffusion at the economic bottom which is the key to improving quality of life and livelihood in the digital era that has set in.