Sixty-six hawkers have been selected through a lottery for rehabilitation in “hangars” built by the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) in a temporary market complex.
The hawkers who will be relocated now sell their wares on the main road behind Nazrul Tirtha, which leads to the Rail Vihar housing complex, and the pavements on both sides of the thoroughfare.
The area, in AF Block, has more than 300 stalls encroaching on pavements and roads. The situation is similar behind the New Town bus stop and in front of Home Town Mall, near the clock tower.
Both pavements outside the DLF II complex, around 2.3km from New Town police station, have been taken over by stalls. Hawkers have also encroached on public space in front of Candor IT Park and Ecospace, among other places.
The stalls (housed in what NKDA calls “hangars”) where the hawkers will be relocated are near the office of the deputy commissioner of police, New Town, and barely 200 metres from where the traders currently sell their wares.
There are multiple hangars in the temporary market complex which the NKDA had built more than eight years ago for relocation of hawkers.
But till date only a handful of hawkers operate from there, while pavements across the township are blocked with stalls made of bamboo poles, plastic sheets and plywood.
On Thursday, The Telegraph spoke to many hawkers who sell fruits, cellphone accessories and sundry other items from stalls on pavements. All of them are averse to shifting to stalls in the hangars fearing a sharp drop in sales.
Many of them said they were not the ones who had originally set up stalls on pavements. They claimed they pay rent to those who first set up the stalls.
“We don’t want to shift to the stalls set up by the NKDA as they are far from where we do business now. People like to see our wares on display. The stalls built by the NKDA are much smaller than what we have now,” said Nikhil Sardar, who runs a fruit shop on a pavement in front of Rail Vihar.
“Our sales are bound to hit severely if we move to there. Our regular customers will not take the trouble of walking to the market to buy from us.”
An NKDA official said they had selected the 66 hawkers who have been allotted stalls through a lottery, whose results were announced earlier this week.
Shaktiman Ghosh, president of Hawker Sangram Samiti, said the hawkers who have been selected don’t occupy one continuous stretch of a pavement. “Even if they move, the pavement will not be freed. The authorities were to talk to us before allocating the stalls, but they did not do that,” Ghosh said.
His organisation will organise a protest rally on March 13.
Sheds built for hawkers near Ecospace in New Town