Hawkers will be disciplined and a survey to identify their numbers has started, mayor Firhad Hakim said on Friday after the first meeting of the five-member committee that chief minister Mamata Banerjee had announced on Thursday to regulate hawkers.
On Friday morning, a team from the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), accompanied by police, conducted the survey in Gariahat.
Hakim said the survey in the New Market area will start on Monday. Most hawkers who had their stalls on roads in the New Market area kept the stalls closed on Friday.
“We are not evicting hawkers. We will discipline them,” Hakim said.
The members of the committee are Hakim, deputy mayor Atin Ghosh, mayoral council member Debashis Kumar and state ministers Aroop Biswas and Malay Ghatak.
Kolkata Police commissioner, KMC commissioner and the secretary of the state urban development department attended the meeting, too.
Survey
“The survey started in Gariahat today. The survey in New Market will start on Monday,” said Hakim. In the first phase, he said, the survey will be conducted in areas that have a large number of hawkers.
Then the rest of the city will be covered.
“We are using an app to do the survey and store the information of the stalls,” Hakim said.
A senior KMC official said the survey will be a GIS (Geographic Information System)-based exercise where the coordinates of the stalls will be recorded. The name of the hawker and his or her picture will be stored and the information linked with Aadhaar.
The Aadhaar-linking will ensure that one person does not have more than one stall in the city, an official said. However, there seems no guarantee that a hawker can be prevented from opening a second stall in someone else’s name.
Hakim said repeated visits will be required to ensure that stalls are not sold.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has asked the committee to state the actual number of hawkers in the state.
Godowns
The civic body identified two possible locations — in Gariahat and Behala — to set up godowns where hawkers can keep their wares.
Hakim said the search for such locations elsewhere, like in New Market and Hatibagan, would continue.
“We have also sought the police’s help to identify any land or building that can be used for this purpose,” the mayor said at a news conference after the meeting of the five-member committee.
The godowns in Gariahat and Behala will take about three months to be ready, Hakim said.
The members of the committee also went on a short inspection of New Market. They did not tour all the streets surrounding New Market, but covered barely 250m from the KMC headquarters before turning back.
Parking
Display boards announcing whether a road is a “feeparking zone” or a “free parking zone” will be put up, Hakim said.
This, he said, will prevent collection of money by illegal parking attendants along free parking zones. If people know that a stretch of a road is a free parking zone, they won’t pay money even if asked to by illegal attendants.
During a meeting at Nabanna on Thursday, Mamata had repeatedly raised the issue of illegal parking in the city.
Calcuttans are also used to seeing parking bays that do not have any chart listing the parking fees. The KMC is also looking for land to set up multi-level parking facilities.
Stalls
Hakim said the back of the footpath stalls would be covered with polycarbonate sheets, where schemes of the state government would be displayed. The polycarbonate sheets will replace the torn and stained pieces of cloth that traders now put up to protect their wares from dust.
