Street Vendors

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Chennai     Suresh, our Bangalore organizer, surprised me by coming over on the train to meet me in the afternoon on our rounds of Chennai.  We were walking through the central district “constituency” with M. Sampath.  Sampath had formally represented this area as a city councilor from the CPI (Communist Party of India).  His wife …

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Informal Worker Communities

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Bangalore  The meetings are great.  The press conferences are important for the campaign.  All of that is true, but nothing beats the direct organizing — even with translation — that I have had the opportunity to do in more than a half-dozen informal worker communities of different types around this surprisingly large, sprawling 5M+ city. …

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Hawkers Hurting

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Bangalore Vinod Shetty of ACORN India and I joined members of the Farmers and Hawkers unions in Bangalore at the Press Club to release the conclusions of a survey report that our India FDI Watch Campaign had done in partnership with the large NGO, Action Aid.  Not surprisingly at least to us, 96% of the hawkers …

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