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The Book                                             

Introduction to Law, Liberty and Livelihood

Law, Liberty and Livelihood: Making a Living on the Street is a path-breaking study of what ails the urban poor.  With detailed analysis of laws, personal interviews, field research, and case studies, the book shows that the absence of economic freedom is the main source of urban poverty. By researching issues at the ground level, the study details how these problems are caused, and what can be done to manage them. 

Law, Liberty and Livelihood is the first of its kind of study in India that looks at state and municipal regulations to trace their debilitating effects on the working class poor. Hence you will find that the book has fleshed out the regulations hurting the working poor and also has an appendix of regulations at the end of almost every chapter for you to scrutinize and form your own judgment.

Read more into Law, Liberty and Livelihood to find how a regulation that places a limit on the number of animals that can be slaughtered in a day (to provide quality food for the end consumer) leads on to ensuring that 60% to 85% of the meat sold in the city is illegal and unhygenic; how laws governing street hawkers snowball into frequent raids and also ensure that there is a revenue loss of crores to the state coffers; why guesstimates peg 70% of shops in Delhi to be unlicensed and therefore illegal; how a license-permit-quota system exists for opening and running schools in Delhi, even in the face of a shortage of educational institutions and of low literacy rates in the city. 

However this book is not about discussing problems only. For the citizen interested in more than just intellectualizing about these issues and going on to doing something about it, Law, Liberty and Livelihood packages policy solutions as well. Solutions that can be implemented without making a trade-off between the urban poor who desire to pursue their livelihoods and the urban denizen who wishes to lead a better quality of life.

These issues are usually relegated to the domain of government authorities on the basis ‘they know best.’ Law, Liberty and Livelihood is a bid to break that status quo and bring these issues to the forefront of the policy debate concerning ill-designed regulations and their implications. It is only by highlighting these issues and solutions through the extensive channels of the media can we hope to provide a context for policy-making with regard to licenses, permits and quotas and make policy-makers conscious of the consequences of their policies.

Law, Liberty and Livelihood will not only tell you what is wrong. It will also tell you what can be done to manage these problems using available public policy ideas and solutions.

The book is essential reading for the intelligent layman concerned with economic regulations, livelihoods of urban poor and urban governance. Those in the media, NGOs, Urban Planning, Public Administration, Labour issues, Economics and Law would be especially interested at its relevance in providing new perspectives to their work. Government departments and educational institutions would find it a valuable resource for their personnel in terms of engaging thought on urban regulatory issues.