If the authorities want, they can.

In New Town on Wednesday, hawkers resisted when an eviction drive began.

They relented about two hours later because police and the officials there held their ground.

Calcutta has seen many failed eviction drives, where the authorities backtracked at the slightest hint of resistance. But unfamiliar scenes unfolded on Wednesday.

At 12.30pm on Tuesday, a team from the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) reached the area behind Coal Bhavan in AF Block, a stone’s throw from Nazrul Tirtha.

Hawkers who ran stalls occupying an entire pavement surrounded the team. They threw stones at the officials and started a sit-in to stall the eviction.

The eviction team stayed put.

At 2.30pm, the police started making announcements asking hawkers to move
back as the structures would be demolished.

Then the bulldozers moved in.

By 4.30pm, the remains of multiple stalls lay on the pavement and the remnants were being loaded on trucks and mini-trucks.

The hawkers justified their presence by blocking footpaths.

“We had given our land at throwaway prices for New Town to come up. We have no source of income other than the shops. The authorities have not given us any notice before they came here,” said Swapan Mondal, who sells tea.

“NKDA, go back”, he shouted, along with many others.

The drive went on.

A senior NKDA official said 11 stalls had been razed. These stall owners had refused to vacate the place even after alternative arrangements had been made for them.

“We had conducted a survey and found that earlier there were 59 stalls here. We allotted every hawker one stall at the temporary hawkers’ market set up near the office of the deputy commissioner of police in New Town. While 48 hawkers moved to their allotted stalls, 11 refused to budge,” said the NKDA chief executive officer, Prasanta Kumar Barai.

Asked how Wednesday’s drive was different, senior NKDA officials and officers from the Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate said Trinamool leaders had scuttled all eviction drives in the past.

None of the leaders was present on Wednesday. There were no phone calls to stop the drive either, police sources said.

The move comes two days after chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s outburst that
encroachers were being backed by political leaders
and police in exchange for money.

“Earlier, an eviction team would often run into protests backed by local Trinamool leaders. We received multiple calls from the senior leadership in the area asking us to back down. This was not the case this time,” said a senior NKDA official.

The inspector in charge of New Town police station, Kallol Ghosh, said: “We had been assigned a job and we did it. We refused to budge from our stand.”

The New Town authorities have built multiple hangars to rehabilitate hawkers. Most of them are still empty inside.

However, large swathes of New Town’s walkways are overrun with hawkers that sell vegetables, mobile phone accessories and sundry other items.

A similar drive was conducted in front of the Technopolis Building.