The Supreme Court has banned street food in Delhi. (And we were taught that the court only concerns itself with matters of the constitution and fundamental rights.)
Street food is one of the reasons why dilliwalahs live. It is my fundamental right to have chaat everyday and get an upset stomach. Or get pissed drunk and then fight through the crowd at Rajinder da Dhaba to have my dinner. Foreigners flock to the city to have a first hand experience of it. Come on, we gave the travel journalism a new word - Delhi Belly. Here are a couple of blogs celebrating the experience. (street food NOT Delhi Belly !!!)
On a serious note, much of the lower income groups depend on street food as their main diet. The street food is a microcosm of the various communities who live here - each of them has contributed to it over the years. Yes hygiene is important but you cannot a make a city clean by banning everything. Its time we did something about it, before the Supreme Court bans Indian style toilets and other such delights.
Don’t you agree?
4 comments:
Darn! There goes another reason for coming back to India!
thats pretty f**d up! are these guys for real?! first it was the oil processing cottage industry and now this?!
are they really planning to make illegal the livelihoods of our chaiwalas and dhabawalas? are the langars of gurudwaras, the zakat at mosques, and the bhandaras which feed millions of poor people daily in temples going to be criminalized?
Modern, pseudo hygiene laws that are designed for the centralized industrial food culture of the west where food from farms to tables travels over long distances and is processed via machines will not produce food safety in india. it will only produce poverty and unemployment by destroying millions of small-scale livelihoods in food production and processing.
you are right. we really must do something about this.
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