Street vendors who once lined the busy stretches of Polo and Jail Road in Shillong are now setting up shop in purpose-built vending zones — a quiet but consequential shift that Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma says is remaking the city without displacing the people who make it hum.

New zones at Polo and the SBI Parking Lot

The newly designated vending spaces are located at the Parking Lot opposite SBI and near Matri Mandir, Polo — both accessible, high-footfall locations chosen to keep vendors within viable commercial reach. The move is being executed under the Meghalaya Street Vendors Scheme, which provides the regulatory and logistical framework for the transition. Sangma emphasised that the relocation was 'carried out through extensive consultations with vendors and stakeholders, ensuring that the transition is smooth, voluntary and respectful.'

The CM's Urban Livelihood Grant bridges the gap

To cushion vendors through the shift, the state government has introduced the Chief Minister's Urban Livelihood Grant — a direct financial assistance measure for eligible vendors moving to the new spaces. The grant addresses one of the most persistent failures of urban relocation drives across India: vendors are moved, but their incomes collapse before the new location picks up footfall. Whether the grant's scale is sufficient will be the real test once the zones mature.

Shillong's congestion problem and the 2014 law behind the fix

Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya and a dense urban centre in Northeast India, has long grappled with narrow roads choked by informal vending alongside pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The intervention draws its legal backbone from the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 — a central law that mandates states to create designated vending zones while explicitly protecting vendor rights. More than a decade after that law's passage, many Indian cities are still working through its implementation. Shillong's Polo-Jail Road exercise is part of that slow national reckoning.

The broader pattern is familiar: Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and several other cities have attempted regulated vending zones with mixed results, the outcome almost always hinging on whether vendors actually earn enough in the new spot to stay put. Shillong's addition of a dedicated livelihood grant is an attempt to learn from those earlier stumbles.

The next markers to watch are the rollout of additional vending zones across Shillong and whether the livelihood grant translates into stable incomes — not just a one-time cushion.