Every time street food seller Feroz Choudhary sees a council van with an "on duty" sign, he grabs his hotplate, dumps the coal from his cooker and flees. He is 39 now, married with three children and getting fed up with this twice-daily exercise.
He is one of the estimated 200,000 street vendors in Mumbai who sell anything from south Indian savoury pancakes to sex toys at prices far cheaper than restaurants and shops.
More than 90 percent of the hawkers operate illegally since the government stopped handing out licences, save to the odd cobbler or disabled vendor, more than 20 years ago.
As a move to deter the swelling ranks of pavement traders, it has failed palpably since Mumbai has more of the country's estimated 10 million hawkers than any other city, according to government figures.
But it is the cause of fierce controversy in the battle for space in this crowded city, where pedestrians are often forced to walk on the congested roads to avoid the traders.
The city administration has pronounced a "zero-tolerance" policy to pull down stalls, though even senior officials admit it is selectively employed.
Tensions run high with government workers demanding extra security to break up hawker settlements after one official was beaten up during a demolition drive.
Two or three times a day, open-topped lorries roll into the business district of this western city where Choudhary has worked for more than 20 years.
If government workers seize his pots of ingredients and his heavy cooker, the vendor will have to pay 2,000 rupees (45 dollars) to get them back and he is finding it hard to pay up after being nabbed many times.
Under pressure since the start of the clean-up drive last year, Choudhary's weekly income has been slashed by 80 percent to 1,000 rupees a week.
He has laid off the six people who used to work for him and lost count of the times he has been caught.
"I can't bear it now," he says, as he scrapes up the ingredients on the hot plate for a "pav bhaji" (a vegetable dish served with bread) that costs workers about 15 rupees a plate.
"There's big fashionable hotels around here and big offices but there's no small places where people can get cheap food.
"But when they (government workers) come, you just take as much as you can. When they snatch my stuff I think: how long can I last? I'm not earning that much."
The issue has exercised India's highest court, committees headed by judges and the national government for several decades but only now is the issue coming to a head, say officials and activists.
Citizens' groups, angered by the extent that Mumbai's pavements have become cluttered by traders, have used the courts to press their case for "hawker zones" while trade unions have struck back to preserve what little rights their members have.
Cooking on the streets has already been banned for health and hygiene reasons, and other vendors are barred from operating near hospitals and railway stations.
The police and council launch sporadic clean-up drives, pulling down rickety stalls and shelters, and the Supreme Court is due this summer to rule on plans licensing some 23,000 vendors in about 200 "hawker zones".
The man in charge of administering policy for hawkers in Mumbai says little will change unless there is a radical shift in attitude.
"Since they're supposed to be illegal and unlicensed they work by paying all kinds of bribes to all kinds of people, including the police, BMC (Mumbai council) officials, the local politicians and many others," says Subrat Ratho, additional municipal commissioner, in his city council office.
He says there are too few people to remove the illegal hawkers, who just set up again after being caught, even though police are supposed to keep areas clear and council officials face "severe action" if they return.
"It's not do-able," says Ratho. "These drives come and go."
He wants to regulate the vendors so the government can collect fees and bring the "industry" back into the mainstream economy.
Despite his doubts about the current drive, he remains hopeful of a solution after the government brought out a national street vendor policy in 2004 following years of delays.
For the first time, the government said street vendors had a legitimate right to trade and played an important role in supplying cheap goods.
It talked of treating street vendors "as an integral and legitimate part of the urban distribution system" and urged state officials to make them part of development plans.
But the letter pages of Mumbai's newspapers show that opinion remains bitterly divided in the debate between vendors versus pavement space.
"If you have 800 hawkers outside Churchgate (one of Mumbai's biggest railway stations) while the whole population pours out every day, it's a bit much," says Nayana Kathpalia, of Citispace, a group that has fought to reclaim public spaces.
"Something needs to be done. There's a place for everybody but if pavements are there for pedestrians, they should have them to walk on." While Kathpalia backs the idea of "hawker zones", Ratho is not so sure and wants local committees to decide the best places for the vendors.
He says the licensing plan will not work. "That would mean instead of chasing 185,000 hawkers around the city we would be chasing 177,000," he says simply.
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