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The paper makes an attempt to define 'Street politics' in the context of the contemporary developing world taking encroachment on the public land by the urban poor as a specific case. Depicting thoroughly how the pavement space in the city of Calcutta, India, became a contested site of so many claims ranging from legal to paralegal, the paper seeks to observe street politics not as a process or an institutional form of politics but as a set of relations between the government and the populations on the streets shaped through and conditioned by the operation of the modern governmental systems. The paper uses this understanding of street politics as a prism to gaze at the fuzzy domain of the politics of the informal poor. It subsequently presents a detailed ethnographic account of bow different informal groups invent strategies, sometimes fighting with each other and sometimes making horizontal consolidations, to manoeuvre governmental policies that put restrictions on their livelihood practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]