Thirteen shops that were operating from the Roxy Cinema building in Esplanade despite being served eviction notices months ago were sealed by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) on Saturday.
With their eviction, the KMC now has the entire building in its possession.
The civic body has plans to shift some of its departments from its headquarters, just across the road from Roxy, to this building.
There is space constraint in the headquarters and some of the offices that were earlier running from the headquarters have already shifted to the Roxy building.
With the eviction of the remaining shops, the work of shifting departments and offices could gain speed. A senior official of the civic body said decades ago the civic body had leased out space in the Roxy building, owned by the KMC, to a lessee.
“The lessee who had taken the property from the KMC further sublet it to others. Our agreement with the lessee ended and has not been renewed. Therefore, those who were running their shops currently did not have any right tobe there,” said the official.
Nine other shops that were also served eviction notices shut down earlier, said an official.
Roxy Cinema, the decades-old cinema hall after which the building is known, also shut down a couple of years ago.
Ramashankar Tiwari, who used to run a bag shop from the building that was sealed on Saturday, said he was hopeful the KMC would allow them to run their stores.
“We will meet the mayor. We hope that the government will think about us and allow us to run our shops from there,” he said.
A KMC official said the shopowners had moved courts after the KMC served them an eviction notice years ago, but the courts had ruled in favour of the civic body.