The Oberoi Grand is a high-security zone where many “important people” come and hawkers cannot insist on putting up stalls around the hotel, chief minister Mamata Banerjee said on Thursday.

Mamata said that if required, hawkers who now occupy that stretch will have to move elsewhere. The pavement in front of The Oberoi Grand has become “congested”, she said.

The stretch she was referring to was once a tony shopping arcade. Guests from the Grand hotel would often step out to shop for gifts and essentials there. That is long gone. Now, pedestrians often have to snail their way past the footpath stalls, apologetically.

The chief minister’s comment on overcrowding of the pavement outside the hotel came barely two months after Calcutta’s town vending committee turned down a request from the hotel authorities to declare the Grand Arcade a no-vending zone, which means no hawkers will be allowed there.

Senior officials of The Oberoi Grand, fondly called the grand dame of Chowringee, had put the request before the vending committee in March. They were told that it was not possible to make the arcade a no-vending zone.

According to the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act 2014, a central law, every municipal body will have a town vending committee to identify and issue licences to hawkers. The committee — comprising elected representatives, civic officials, hawkers, NGOs and cops, among others — is empowered to regulate hawkers and take action against errant traders.

“It has become congested opposite the Grand hotel. They (hawkers) cannot insist on sitting near Grand. This cannot be allowed,” Mamata said.

“Grand-ey anek security (it is a high-security zone).... If I allow this (hawkers), any big incident can happen anytime,” she said.

Mamata announced a five-member committee that will conduct a survey outside The Oberoi Grand and find out ways to resolve the hawker problem. The members of the committee are Calcutta mayor Firhad Hakim, deputy mayor Atin Ghosh, mayoral council members Debabrata Majumdar and Debashis Kumar, and minister Aroop Biswas.

“I am not asking you to visit with bulldozers. I am asking you to see how this can be sorted. If required, they (the hawkers) have to sit elsewhere,” she said.

Mamata also issued the same instruction to the committee on the New Market area, the roads outside the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) headquarters and Hatibagan, where hawkers have taken over the road, she said.

The KMC had in January published the names of 1,892 roads that it declared
as no-vending zones. The list did not include the Grand Arcade.

The police had on Tuesday removed hawkers from Chowringee Place, the road along the northern boundary of The Oberoi Grand leading to Roxy cinema from Chowringhee Road.

On Wednesday, the cops cleared Humayun Place, the road parallel to Chowringee Place, along the southern boundary of the Grand hotel. Humayun Place had hawkers sitting on the road in addition to the pavement.

The KMC and the city’s town vending committee had earlier set deadlines for hawkers to move away from Humayun Place but they went on with their business as usual. The police and the KMC did not act against them until June 26.

The late Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi, then executive chairman of EIH Limited, the owners of The Oberoi Grand, had spoken about the encroachment of the arcade in 2018, when he was in the city for the company’s annual general meeting. “If you want to buy something from the Grand Arcade, you can’t go there. The shopkeepers are crying,”
he said.

On Thursday, a shop owner in the Grand Arcade said the hawkers would initially sit on the pavement and flee when the police came. In the mid-2000s, “some stalls were set up”. “The numbers grew rapidly since 2010,” he said.

The present status of the Grand Arcade is relatively better than what it was even six months ago, when stalls occupied about two-thirds of its width.

The change followed an order by Calcutta High Court on November 28, 2023, that all hawkers in the arcade be restricted within a third of the width of the pavement.

The KMC, the police and the town vending committee of Calcutta, which had not acted for years, shrugged away some of their slumber after the court order. But several violations continue.