Deepak Disagrees
Ep 22: Street vendors are not encroachers! | Prashant Narang on public spaces, property rights, and who decides
Prashant Narang believes that street vendors are not encroachers. He argues that the state has wrongly cast honest vendors as illegal, and that a vendor who sells on a footpath is simply free enterprise at work. He goes further still: a vendor who has held the same spot for years has earned a real claim to it, and the state should protect that claim rather than evict them. But is vending a legitimate use of public land? Should we reward encroachers with property rights? And how do we decide how public land is to be used? Prashant is a lawyer. He was a senior fellow at the Centre for Civil Society, and is now Deputy Program Director at the TrustBridge Rule of Law Foundation. He has worked on the rights of street vendors for more than a decade, since 2013, and he writes and litigates on free markets, property, and the rule of law.
