Plastic sheets are back around hawkers’ stalls across the city following the arrival of the monsoon.
Across Kolkata, hawkers’ stalls along pavements in Esplanade, Hatibagan and Gariahat, and around New Market are wrapped in plastic sheets though their use has been banned.
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has no plans to remove the sheets at least till the monsoon is over, a source in the civic body said.
Rules prepared by the state government for hawkers ban the use of plastic sheets because they are flammable.
In the absence of any alternative, the hawkers are using the sheets overhead and on all sides of their stalls to protect the wares from getting wet in the rain, said a hawker leader.
“We are working on improving the condition of the stalls. At the moment I can only say this,” Debashis Kumar, mayoral council member in charge of matters related to hawking, said on Sunday when asked about the proliferation of plastic sheets in the stalls.
Kumar did not want to comment on whether the KMC will remove the sheets.
The kMC allowed construction of tin shades over the stalls but till now only hawkers in Gariahat have built such shades. Even in Gariahat, many hawkers have hung plastic sheets at the back to protect their wares from rain.
In other parts of the city, including around New Market and in Esplanade and Hatibagan, the use of plastic sheets is more abundant.
On Sunday, The Telegraph saw large plastic sheets hanging above and around stalls on footpaths near Peerless Inn and along Lindsay Street.
“We are unlikely to take any action against the hawkers using plastic sheets now because the monsoon has arrived,” said a source in the KMC who did not want to be named.
A fire that broke out at a hawker’s stall in Gariahat in 2019 gutted large portions of the building that houses the Traders Assembly and Adi Dhakeswari Bastralaya stores.
Residents had alleged that the fire spread to the building through plastic sheets that were hung over the stalls and tied to the building.
The rules also mention that hawkers cannot set up stalls encroaching on a road, no stall can face a road and at least two-thirds of the width of a pavement must be kept free for pedestrians.
But the rules are routinely flouted.
Debasish Das, a hawker leader and a member of Kolkata’s town vending committee, admitted that the situation is worsening by the day. “The number of hawkers is increasing in the New Market area,” he said.
A central act passed in 2014 empowers the town vending committee of each city and town to take decisions to regulate hawking.