Negotiating Livelihood during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown led to the closure of all markets in Manipur, including the Tribal Market Complex in Imphal East. This article focuses on how the women vendors negotiated their livelihood during the lockdown and analyses its impact. It looks at their ability to cope amidst vulnerability and marginalisation against the backdrop of the ongoing economic turmoil and potentially the disease itself, highlighting their plight and resilience.

We would like to acknowledge the Tribal Women Vendors Association, chairperson, the women vendors, and joint secretary of Tribal Youth Club, New Lambulane for providing much-needed information and interactions.

We also express our gratitude to Ngamjahao Kipgen, who teaches sociology at the Department of Humanities and Sociology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, for his critical inputs and suggestions towards the paper.

The authors are grateful to the suggestions made by the anonymous reviewer.

Manipur is renowned for its “women markets.” The tribal women vendors of the Tribal Market Complex¹ are intra-state migrants of the surrounding hill districts of Manipur. The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 defines “stationary vendors” as street vendors who carry out vending activities on a regular basis at specific locations. Cohen et al (2010) point out that the terms market vendor, street vendor and vendor are frequently used interchangeably and loosely defined across countries and cultures. In some countries, the term street vendor covers marketplace vendors as well as pavement sellers, mobile street hawkers, and home-based vendors. In others, marketplaces are a separate category and may be legal or illegal (Cohen et al 2010: 4). The unique feature of markets in Manipur is that they are run solely by women for women since the precolonial period and this tradition continues. The immense role of Manipur women in trade has been commented upon by British colonial officers such as Brown (2001: 76), Dun (1975), Hudson (2010: 23), and Hunter (1886: 17).

According to Bhowmik (2005), the term street vendor includes stationary as well as mobile vendors and it incorporates all other local/region-specific terms used to describe them. However, in Manipur there is a marked difference between market vendors and street vendors: those outside the purview of licence holders are referred to as street vendors or hawkers and even though granted legal status by the municipalities, street vendors are liable to face more harassment from the authorities unlike the licensed market vendors. As such, the term market vendors has been used in this article to mean stationary women vendors licensed to sell in the Tribal Market Complex. The topic has been chosen given the inadequate studies on tribal women vendors of Manipur in academia unlike the studies on the “Ima market” (women market) or Khwairamband market. Moreover, as Skinner (2020) opined,