Street vendors are entrepreneurs who earn their livelihood by selling goods and services in public spaces. While the Street Vendors Act (SVA) 2014 recognizes vendors’ rights to conduct business on the street, it provides them with communal rights—the shared rights to use public spaces—and not exclusive private rights. The absence of private rights makes vendors vulnerable to frequent evictions and harassment and encourages them to adopt informal practices to assert property rights over a specific spot. Existing literature views informality as a consequence of the law’s poor implementation and falls short of explaining vendors’ reliance on informal practices and the value they place on private rights. To fill this gap, we conducted qualitative interviews with 70 stationary vendors across 24 locations in Delhi, India, to explore how vendors assert a de facto private right within the communal rights framework provided by the SVA 2014. We find that vendors value exclusivity over a spot and have devised various informal mechanisms to secure them. These mechanisms include trading vending spots, rental agreements with local storefront owners and other vendors, and conflict resolution through informal representatives, like market Pradhans. Vendors value informal arrangements because they reduce transaction costs, improve tradability of spots, increase predictability, and are better enforced.

KEYWORDS: Street Vendors, Property Rights, Informality, Contracts, Urban Governance