The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will rehabilitate nearly 100 hawkers who have been vending vegetables and other items outside the Park Circus market for several years.

The civic body will allot 35 square feet to each hawker as part of a scheme to resolve the impasse over pulling down the dilapidated market and rebuilding a new one.

For the redevelopment, stall owners will be shifted to Park Circus Maidan in the intervening period.

A team of officials from the KMC’s market department will visit the Park Circus market and draw up a list of hawkers who have been squatting outside the market for years in consultation with stall owners.

These hawkers will be shifted along with the stall owners to Park Circus Maidan. Once the new building is constructed, each will be offered space on the ground floor of the market building.

The decision was reached on Wednesday during a meeting with the KMC officials and representatives of the decades-old market, senior KMC officials said.

“Officials will check with the stall owners and others and identify hawkers who have been selling their stuff for years on a stretch outside the Park Circus market before drawing up a list. Those who are part-time hawkers or have sold their right to someone else won’t be considered,” Amiruddin (Bobby), who heads the KMC’s markets department as member mayor-in-council.

“The stall owners had several demands and we have accepted almost all of them. Work on pulling down the market building will begin after the shop owners shift to Park Circus Maidan after the Pujas.”

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday expressed her concern about the dilapidated state of several market buildings in the city and instructed the urban development department and the KMC to take up their repairs immediately.

“I am scared of several markets. They might come tumbling down any moment,” Mamata said at a televised meeting of senior state government officials and ministers on hawkers and markets at Nabanna.

“I’m telling you people will die while doing their bazzar unless they are immediately renovated,” she said.

The existing Park Circus market building, portions of which were built in the late 1930s and the rest in the mid-1950s, has been in disrepair for several years now.

A section of traders said the western portion, on Beckbagan Row, is in “extremely bad” shape.

Since February, the KMC has been trying to bring the stall owners and vendors on the same page and arrive at an agreement before pulling down the building.

The new six-storey building with an underground parking lot will take a little over two years to come up. During this time, the shop owners will be shifted to one part of Park Circus Maidan.

The shop owners have been demanding the market be downgraded to Category C from its existing Category B as per the list of KMC markets. This will reduce the rent they have to pay to the civic body.

Senior KMC officials said traders have to pay rent at Rs 4.5 per square foot in Category B markets and Rs 3.5 per square foot in Category C markets.

“This demand has been accepted along with most of the others demands,” said Tapas Kumar Mukherjee, general secretary of the Traders of Kolkata Municipal Markets Welfare Society.

“Shop owners will be provided with an equal amount of space as that of their existing stalls at Park Circus Maidan,” he added.