Every morning, long before offices open and formal markets begin trading, thousands of street vendors take up their positions across Pakistan’s roads and public spaces. They sell fruit, vegetables, books, tea, clothing and other everyday essentials, offering affordability and convenience to millions in cities where access to formal retail is often uneven. Yet despite their visible role in urban life, these workers remain largely invisible in law. They sustain a significant part of the informal economy, but continue to operate without clear legal recognition or consistent regulatory protection. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), nearly 72 per cent of Pakistan’s non-agricultural employment is informal, while the 2023 Population Census shows that almost 39 per cent of the country’s population now lives in urban areas.

This contradiction lies at the heart of Pakistan’s urban governance challenge. Street vendors are indispensable to the functioning of the city, yet they are still treated as temporary, unlawful or undesirable. The result is not simply hardship for vendors themselves, but a wider failure to reconcile economic reality with fair and effective governance.

Pakistan has yet to enact a comprehensive national law governing street vending. Instead, vendors are subject to a patchwork of municipal by-laws and outdated statutes that were designed mainly to regulate the use of public space rather than accommodate informal commerce. This creates a fragmented legal landscape in which enforcement depends less on clear principles than on administrative discretion. Neither vendors nor regulators operate within a framework that clearly defines rights, responsibilities and limits on authority.

The constitutional implications are difficult to ignore. Articles 18, 25, and 14 of the Constitution of Pakistan promise equality before the law, the freedom to pursue lawful occupations and the protection of human dignity. Yet anti-encroachment drives often result in confiscation of goods, forced evictions and the destruction of livelihoods, frequently without transparent procedures or........

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