Articles by Sharit Bhowmik

The Supreme Court has directed the government to pass the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill, 2009 by 30 June 2011. However, the bill does not include significant clauses of the National Policy for Urban Street Vendors as recommended by the National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. If passed in its present form, it will constitute a mockery of street vendors' rights. If the government is serious about protecting the livelihoods of the urban working poor, it must incorporate not only the clauses of the national policy but also the progressive steps taken in this area by the governments of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Chhattisgarh.

in these areas. That task remains to be undertaken.
Similarly, Perrings defines possession rigorously. "The commitment of positively valued resources to the exaction of environ- mental resources implies that the latter are possessed and so endowed with value. Proprietary rights in a process are, by contrast, necessary but not sufficient to ensure that the outputs of that process are positively valued... The possession of a resource implies that it is incorporated in a particular property and, hence, value system..." He analyses the multiplicity of value systems that have existed historically by drawing upon anthropological literature. The results of this analysis will be of value to development economists and policymakers. It would be interesting to compare and contrast Perrings' results in, say, the context of urban informal markets, as analysed by, for example, N Vijay Jaganathan in Informal Markers in Developing Countries, (OUP, 1987).

TEA Gift for Private Sector Sharit Bhowmik THE Tea Board has recently released its Draft Seventh Five-Year Plan for the Tea Industry (1985-86 to 1989-90). The plan is quite impressive in terms of outlay, which is three times higher than the outlay in the previous plan. The Sixth Plan (1980-81 to 1984- 35) had an outlay of Rs 300 crore, whereas this plan has an outlay of Rs 900 crore. The Tea Board's contribution is to be Rs 130 crore, and the industry is to generate Rs 300 crore, that is, 33 per cent of the total outlay. The rest will be borne by the financial institutions such as NABARD, IDBI, commercial banks and the State Financial Corporations. By the end of the plan period, production is expected to incease from 625.55 million kg estimated for 1984-85 to 766 million kg in

TEA Labour's Gains Lost Sharit Bhowmik ON July 18, under a three-year wage agreement, the tea garden workers of West Bengal have been granted what press reports have called a 'wage increase'. By the new agreement, the state's 250,000 tea siarden workers (213,000 of whom are permanent) will get increments of 75 paise every year; child workers (aged between 14-16 years) will get three annual increments of 38 paise. At present the daily wages are Rs 9 in Dooars (Jalpaiguri district), Rs 8-94 in. Terai, and Rs 8 62 in Dar- jeeling Hills (both in Darjeeling district). Thus the now promised annual increment hardly carries the wage level lo any civilised mark, if one were to consider the cost of living:. Moreover, the tripartite agreement was signed one year after the earlier agreement expired. The enhanced wages will thus be given from April 1983, and not from July 1982 when the earlier agreement expired