All hawkers in the Oberoi Grand arcade will have to sit in a single line and there cannot be traders facing each other, Kolkata's town vending committee decided on Wednesday.
Members of the committee, along with police and officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), will visit the arcade on Thursday afternoon to shift all hawkers who sit along the side of the passage that is lined with stores, civic officials said.
Stalls will be allowed only along the side of the arcade that adjoins Chowringhee Road, said a KMC official.
“We will visit the arcade on Thursday. Hawkers who are sitting in front of the stores will be shifted. In all likelihood, hawkers with stalls along the road will have to make space for stalls on the opposite side. This has to be worked out by the hawkers,” said Debashis Das, a hawker leader and member of the city’s town vending committee.
The committee is made of police officers, hawkers, CMC officials, NGOs and traders, among others.
The late Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi, then executive chairman of EIH Limited, the owner of Oberoi Grand, had spoken about the encroachment of the arcade in 2018.
Oberoi, who was in Calcutta to attend the annual general meeting of the EIH, had said: “It is very sad to see what is happening to the centre of the city.... I feel very sad when I come to Calcutta. The city has deteriorated. There is no real development.... No new investment is coming to Bengal.... You should know the reason. If you want to buy something from the Grand Arcade, you can’t go there. The shopkeepers are crying.”
When The Telegraph visited the arcade on Wednesday, there were hawkers’ stalls along both sides of the entire pavement, leaving hardly any space for pedestrians. Pedestrians had to jostle through stalls and shoppers as some stretches had barely three feet free in the middle.
Hawking rules framed by the state government have made it mandatory for hawkers to leave at least two-thirds of the width of a pavement free for pedestrians.
In an order issued on November 28, Justice Amrita Sinha of Calcutta High Court had asked the town vending committee to ensure that two-thirds of the pavement in front of the star hotel was left free for pedestrians.
Justice Sinha had added: “The Corporation shall file a further report mentioning whether two-thirds of the pavement, as was supposed to be kept free, is actually kept free for pedestrian movement. The position of the hawkers in the one-third of the pavement shall be disclosed in the report.”
The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, a central act, has given the committee the power to penalise hawkers and also to take measures to protect their livelihood. Every town or city in the country must have its town vending committee.
“The members of the committee will visit the Oberoi Grand arcade on Thursday to ensure that hawkers do not occupy more than a third of the width of the pavement,” said Debashis Kumar, mayoral council member of the CMC who looks after hawker-related matters.
Kumar is also co-chairperson of the city’s town vending committee. “All hawkers will have to sit in a single line. There cannot be stalls along both sides of the pavement,” Kumar said.
A survey by the committee and the KMC, conducted in 2022, found that there were 116 hawkers at the Grand arcade. Among them were hawkers who were sitting along the side of the pavement in front of the stores.