The North Delhi Municipal Corporation’s bulldozers’ show of strength against roadside stalls, and push carts in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri may face resistance from a Constitution Bench judgment of the Supreme Court which had upheld the right to livelihood of pavement dwellers who ply their trade on the footpaths out of sheer economic compulsions.
Examining the issue that pavement dwellers cannot be treated as trespassers, a five-judge Bench led by then Chief Justice of India Y.V. Chandrachud had held that their eviction should not lead to deprivation of their livelihoods. The court had said that they should not be subject to harassment adding that their right to livelihood was an integral part of the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution.
“No person can live without the means of living, that is, the means of livelihood. If the right to livelihood is not treated as a part of the constitutional right to live, the easiest way of depriving a person of his right to life would be to deprive him of his means of livelihood to the point of abrogation. Such deprivation would not only denude the life of its effective content and meaningfulness but it would make life impossible to live,” the Supreme Court had held in the Olga Tellis case in 1985.
