Since the rapid growth of population in the Dhaka mega city does not comply with the availability of employment in the formal sector a large number of labour force engage them in a wide range of urban informal economic activities, such as domestic work, informal transport, construction, retail business and hawking, cottage industries, handicrafts and services for subsistence earning. 65 percent of the total employment in Dhaka city is in the informal sector (Amin, 1990). Among the informal sector the hawkers and petty traders are 22 percent of employment of the Dhaka city (Amin, 1990). The Dhaka City Corporation (DCC, 2005) and Bangladesh Hawkers Yakkya Parishad (2005) sources said there are currently about 150,000 hawkers running their business on the footpaths, mostly in Motijheel, Baitul Mukarram, Gulistan, Shahbagh and New Market areas.  Some hawkers carry their goods by van; some have permanent stall in Dhaka city; some are doing business at door to door. In general, there are three types of hawkers: mobile, semi-static and static. Most footpaths in the city’s busy are places occupied by hawkers  that often compel pedestrians to walk through the streets with risk and creates serious problems in urban life including traffic jam in the street, physical harassment of women by young people in the passages narrowed down due to hawkers’ encroachment, and road occupancy in the busy areas of the city.   In-spite of all inconveniences created by hawkers in the city, hawking plays an important role in employment and income generation in the Dhaka city. Income generates by hawking is comparable to or greater than the formal sector. Despite low education, lack of skill and poor economic background, the average income of the self-employed in informal sector was two-and-a-half times more than the national minimum wage for the unskilled workers (Amin, 1991). A survey was conducted shows that the average income of hawkers is Tk. 3,305 per month i. e. below the poverty line (Sofiullah, 1996). The hawkers play also important role in the marketing and distribution of goods produced by the locally developed Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This unrecognised service sustain the existence of informal industrial sector and the hawkers provide goods at cheaper prices than retail stores because they do not have the expensive overheads, such as rent or heavy mortgages. There is hardly any comprehensive study on this issue. Mollah (1973) classifies mobile and temporary businesses. The size of informal sector in Dhaka city was estimated by Shankland Cox and Partnership in 1981. Amin (1982a, 1982b & 1991), Islam and Khan (1988) and Rahman (1985-86) have done several in-depth studies on urban informal sector. Most of these studies, however, focused on informal sector in general, but did not take the hawkers into a particular consideration. On this background the present paper aims at identifying the characteristics of hawkers’ activities and their role in the urban economy of Dhaka, based on the information collected by the author through a sample survey using structured questionnaire in 1999 among 200 hawkers selected randomly from only four major concentrations: namely, New Market, Gulistan/Fulbaria, Farmgate and Sadarghat. Though data used in this paper could not have been updated, but in absence any other study conducted in this sector till now, it can contribute even now in understanding economic role of hawkers in the Dhaka city.  This study is also based on a conceptual framework of hawkers. The word `hawker' is usually associated with journeying from place to place and calling his wares. Wong identified hawkers as "little businessmen" (Wong, 1974.  While the well-known economist, W. Arthur Lewis (1958:402), very specifically comments on hawking by saying: “These occupations usually have a multiple of the number they need, each of them earning very small sums from occasional employment; frequently their number can be halved without reducing output in this sector. Petty retail trading is also exactly of this type; it is enormously expanded in over populated economies, each trader makes only a few sales; markets are crowded with stalls, and if the number of stalls were greatly reduced the consumers would be no whit worse off-- they might be better off, since retail margins might fall” (quoted from McGee and Yeung 1977:22).