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This is the first article in a three-part series from a field project on informal work in Kashmir and how it has affected vulnerability and marginalisation amongst vendors. Focusing on two critical city-markets of Batamaloo and Hazratbal Dargah in Srinagar, the series examines how informal workers negotiate livelihood, precarity and everyday regulation. Through these market spaces, the authors examine the social and economic conditions that shape the governing dynamics of urban informality across Kashmir.

The Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES) team conducted around two hundred interviews at two prominent markets in Srinagar, Hazratbal and Batamaloo, to explore how informality and street vending operate on a daily basis. The interviews included cart vendors, women producer-sellers and other street hawkers. The field interviews and observations uncovered a condition of suspended legality, wherein the right to the street is neither denied outright nor meaningfully secured, but negotiated each day, quietly and precariously, by the vendors.

The larger framework for the study is also the policy framework of the government of Jammu and Kashmir. For example, the government said in a written reply in the legislative assembly in February 2026 that it was preparing a broad, aspirational “Vision Document” for a qualitative overhaul of labour welfare policy. Prima facie, this announcement is promising and resonates with the normative objectives of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, which formally recognises street vending as a legitimate and protected means of livelihood.

But our fieldwork in Srinagar showed that for the thousands of hawkers who line the city’s main arteries, such administrative promises often register more as a contradiction. Their situation mirrors what is routinely dismissed as a procedural lapse in many contested spaces but is actually experienced as a steady erosion of rights.

Even as the fiscal machinery of an administrative unit might speak the language of welfare, such as by indexing entitlements to inflation, the municipal apparatus continues to treat street vending as a problem – a visible problem that must be removed rather than accommodated. Vendors are thus caught between two arms of the state that appear to speak past each other. Law, in this setting, does not........

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