Hawker eviction in Dhaka: Solving a scalpel problem with bulldozers
Bangladesh’s economy remains heavily centred on Dhaka. In the absence of sufficient formal jobs, people with little capital find street vending an obvious attraction
It was a small van. The vendor had neatly arranged bread, cakes, biscuits, bananas and other light snacks on it. And for those looking for a pick-me-up, there was also tea, betel leaf, cigarettes, and bottled water.
Then arrived a bulldozer, with the small roadside stall in Mirpur-10 in its crosshairs. A middle-aged couple stood beside the van as the bulldozer rammed into it.
"How can we rent a shop in a market? We would have to pay Tk4-5 lakh in advance. Then there is the rent," they told journalists. "We came from the village less than a year ago. They could have taken the van away instead of demolishing it."
There were tears in their eyes. There was anger too.
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The van, which the couple described as their "last asset" was caught in the eviction drive that Dhaka North City Corporation carried out in Mirpur-10 on 30 September. The operation began in the morning to clear illegally occupied footpaths. It quickly turned violent as hawkers set at least three city corporation garbage trucks on fire and vandalised a police vehicle and an excavator.
Hawkers and officials gave different accounts of what triggered the clash. Dhaka North claimed the attack was planned; hawkers pointed to a fire that broke out during the operation. By the afternoon, the eviction drive had resumed, but whether the hawkers are gone for good is another conversation.
Back before the dust settles
Mirpur made headlines, but the cycle itself is familiar across Dhaka.
On 23 September, Dhaka North conducted another drive in Farmgate, targeting illegal shops, structures and hawkers occupying roads and footpaths.
By 1 October, the hawkers were back. From Khamarbari to the front of Tejgaon College, around the Farmgate footbridge and along the road towards Green Road, the pavements were again lined with stalls. Clothes, shoes, vegetables, street food, cigarettes, and many other goods were being sold. In some stretches, it looked like a permanent market.
Md Robiul runs a small clothing shop and betel-leaf stall beside the Farmgate footbridge.
"Sometimes they run operations to remove us. It causes a lot of loss. Our goods and shops get damaged. But we can manage. There are people," he told TBS. Asked who those "people" were, Robiul did not answer. He avoided the question and returned to serving customers.
The same pattern repeated in the capital's Eskaton area.
Abdul Jalil, a tea vendor near the Ladies Club area, said eviction had become part of their business. "Almost every month, the city corporation comes and throws away our things. This shop is our only source of income," he said. "But local leaders help us return. Sometimes we get information before an operation, so we can move our things. But sometimes we do not know in advance, and then we lose everything."
This is the basic contradiction of Dhaka's footpaths. They are public spaces meant for pedestrians. Yet for thousands of people, they are also workplaces. When stalls cover the pavement, pedestrians are pushed onto the road. Elderly people, children and people with disabilities face even greater problems. Congestion becomes worse and movement becomes unsafe.
But for a hawker, a few feet of pavement can mean the difference between putting food on the table or going hungry.
Evictions are often used to create a quick visual impression of order for the urban middle class. However, this is a delusional solution to a complex problem. The surge in street hawkers and urban migration is a direct consequence of the systemic collapse of formal employment over the last decade.
Why footpaths become a workplace
Bangladesh's economy remains heavily centred on the capital. The World Bank estimates that Greater Dhaka generates around one-fifth of national GDP, almost half of formal employment and more than 30% of formal manufacturing jobs.
So even though Dhaka is expensive and overcrowded, it continues to attract people looking for work. Such was the case of the couple in Mirpur, who said they had arrived from a village less than a year ago to make ends meet.
The 2022 census counted about 10.3 million people inside Dhaka North and Dhaka South city corporations. The UN uses a much broader, harmonised definition of a city and estimated Dhaka's population at 36.6 million in 2025, officially making it the second-most populous city in the world.
Climate pressure is likely to add to internal migration. The World Bank has estimated that Bangladesh could see up to 13.3 million internal climate migrants by 2050 under a pessimistic scenario. That does not mean all of them will come to Dhaka. But floods, river erosion, salinity and damage to rural livelihoods will continue to shape movement within the country.
But the problem is that arriving in Dhaka does not mean finding a formal job.
Bangladesh's labour-force participation rate fell from 60.9% in 2023 to 58.9% in 2024. The World Bank says total employment fell by almost two million during the same period. Unemployment rose only slightly, as many people simply stopped looking for work.
The wider economy is also under pressure. The World Bank projects GDP growth of 3.9% in FY2026. Inflation remains high at 8.5%, while the national poverty rate was estimated to have risen from 18.7% in 2022 to 21.4% in 2025. The World Bank also said wages of low-income workers had failed to keep pace with prices.
For people with little capital, street vending has an obvious attraction. A permanent shop may require several lakh taka in advance, followed by rent, utility bills and other costs. A van or small stall needs far less money and can be placed where customers already are.
That does not make occupying a public footpath legal. But it helps explain why simply removing a stall does not remove the demand to return.
Economist and researcher Maha Mirza recently told TBS that the growth of street vending is tied to deeper economic problems. "Evictions are often used to create a quick visual impression of order for the urban middle class," she said. "However, this is a delusional solution to a complex problem."
She linked the rise of hawking to factory closures, weak formal job creation and pressure on rural livelihoods. "The surge in street hawkers and urban migration is a direct consequence of the systemic collapse of formal employment over the last decade," she said.
Who controls the footpaths?
There is another reason the stalls keep returning. Research suggests that, in parts of Dhaka, access to footpaths and roadside itself has become an informal economy.
A study by Lutfun Lata, Peter Walters and Sonia Roitman, titled "A marriage of convenience: Street vendors' everyday accommodation of power in Dhaka, Bangladesh", was published in the journal Cities in 2019.
Based on fieldwork in and around Sattola in 2015 and 2016, the researchers found that vendors often depended on informal relationships with local political actors, police, mastans and linemen to keep access to public space.
The arrangement was unequal. Vendors had no legal right to the pavement. Regular payments could buy temporary security, but not ownership or protection under the law.
The study also found that linemen could warn vendors before an eviction drive and tell them when it was safe to return. It cited a Dhaka North official describing a system in which corrupt political actors, city officials and law enforcers collected money from vendors, who then returned after eviction.
A more recent study titled "Street politics and class dynamics: Hawkers in Dhaka's New Market", by Dhaka University researchers Md Fozle Rabbi and Md Habibullah Kaiser, was published in February 2026. Its fieldwork covered 60 hawkers and seven case studies in the New Market-Nilkhet-Science Laboratory area in October 2023.
The researchers reported a similar structure. Hawkers in the study described payments collected through linemen and cashiers and distributed among political leaders and police.
Reported daily payments ranged from Tk200 to Tk1,000, depending on shop size, with an average of around Tk300.
Those figures cannot be treated as current rates for all of Dhaka. The studies cover specific places and periods. But the mechanism they describe helps explain what vendors in Farmgate and Eskaton told TBS: an eviction can remove the shop without necessarily removing the local network that allows it to return.
A 2016 study by the Brac Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) offered a broader picture of the money involved. It estimated that Dhaka's street vendors and hawkers paid around Tk1,825 crore a year to extortion rackets. Although a decade old, the estimate shows how lucrative control over public footpaths had become.
A new approach
The government has tried a different approach this year. Under the proposed Dhaka City Hawker Management Policy 2026, the city corporations began issuing digital identity cards and assigning designated vending areas.
Dhaka North listed 829 hawkers on the main roads of Mirpur-1, 2 and 10. In the first phase, 202 received digital IDs. Of them, 102 from Mirpur-10 were selected for relocation to Mirpur-13 WASA Road, while another 100 were to move near Gabtoli kitchen market.
The difficulty, though, is not only finding empty land to relocate hawkers to. The vendors need customers. A legal vending space far from pedestrian traffic may offer security but little business.
Mahtab Uddin, assistant professor of Economics at the University of Dhaka and Research Director at SANEM, told TBS that the answer has to go beyond eviction.
"Eviction is not a solution. Many of these vendors are climate-vulnerable individuals with no safety net," he said.
He suggested registration, proper data collection and structured relocation, including open markets where vendors could rent spaces on daily or weekly terms.
There is still a strong case for enforcement. Dhaka cannot allow every pavement, metro station entrance or busy crossing to become a market. Pedestrians have a right to move safely. But enforcement without a workable alternative has produced the same result again and again.
The pavement is cleared. Officials leave. Hawkers wait. Local arrangements are rebuilt. Then the stalls return. The small van in Mirpur can be destroyed. The tea stall in Eskaton can be removed. Farmgate can be cleared for a week. But if the jobs, migration, cost of formal business and informal control of public space remain unchanged, the pressure will remain.
