Police on Wednesday conducted a drive in parts of the New Market area where hawkers have again started occupying roads and putting up tarpaulin sheets over their stalls.

The police team pulled down tarpaulin sheets with sticks that had hooks attached to them and snapped ropes used to hang the sheets. Uniformed policemen deployed for the drive were accompanied by plainclothesmen.

A senior officer said the hawkers had inched forward on roads in the area during the festive season and the drive was to push them back.

The street vending rules framed by the state government, notified in 2018, bar hawkers from occupying roads.

They are not allowed to hang tarpaulin sheets or use any other flammable material to cover their stalls. The hawkers are also supposed to leave two-thirds width of any pavement free for pedestrians.

The rules, however, are flouted more than they are obeyed.

“A dedicated team goes around the New Market area to rein in hawkers who flout rules. The hawkers crowd roads with wares during the festive season. Our team just pushed them back to clear the thoroughfares,” an officer in the central division of Kolkata Police said.

“We do this routinely,” he said.

Such corrective actions are anything but routine, Calcuttans will vouch.

A team from New Market police station carried out the drive on Wednesday morning, the officer said.

“Some hawkers have not found space since the June action and they are sitting on roads. The police came and pushed them away,” said Mohammad Shahnawaz, a hawker leader in the New Market area.

In June, the police and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation had conducted joint drives to rein in hawkers who had flouted street vending rules and evicted some hawkers who had grabbed new spaces on pavements.

The authorities had taken about an hour to restore Humayun Place to a thoroughfare minus the layers of hawkers’ stalls that had occupied it for years.

The hawkers who were occupying Humayun Place were relocated to the adjoining pavement and were forced to restrict their stalls within one-third width of the pavement, as mandated by the street-vending rules.

Similar drives were carried out elsewhere, too — in Gariahat and Hatibagan, two other shopping hubs in the city, and in New Town and Salt Lake.

The actions came to a halt after chief minister Mamata Banerjee held a meeting with the hawker unions and gave the street vendors a month to deliver on their promise to remove all stalls from the roads and free up enough space on the sidewalks.

Over the next few months, the action against errant hawkers lost its edgeand things returned to the old normal.

A Ballygunge resident said on Wednesday the pavements in Gariahat that had looked cleaner following the drive are now cluttered again with stalls covered by tarpaulin sheets and hawkers occupying more than a third of the width of the pavements.

“The police should conduct such drives across the city,” said the Ballygunge resident.

In the New Market area, where the drive was conducted on Wednesday, hawkers never left the road at least on Bertram Street.

After the June action, they were pushed back towards the wall of New Market leaving more space on the road than before. Over the next few months, they again occupied more road space. The police action on Wednesday was targeted at pushing them back towards the wall.