Life and times on a Calcutta pavement. A Telegraph picture

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation will initiate a drive against pavement-dwellers in the city, following complaints from residents, traders, and councillors of the New Market and Gariahat areas.

Mayor Subrata Mukherjee on Monday directed mayor-in-council member (conservancy) Rajib Deb and municipal commissioner Debashis Som to take action against the mushrooming kerb settlements.

?The rate of growth of streetchildren is alarming. They move in groups along CR Avenue, Bentinck Street and the Esplanade area, in front of tea shops, paan shops, eateries and hotels, begging for food and alms from customers and foreign tourists,? councillor Provakar Mondol complained.

According to the conservancy department, the problem is most acute on Strand Road, Colootolla Street, CR Avenue, Madan Street, a section of CR Avenue between the BB Ganguly Street intersection and Victoria House, Moulali, a section of APC Road between NRS Hospital and Moulali, the pavements around the civic headquarters and the section of south Calcutta spanning Park Circus, Ballygunge Phari and Gariahat.

?These unwanted pavement settlements are parasitic and engender a vicious circle of drug-peddling, theft of manhole covers, breaking the metal fencing of parks and gardens, and car-lifting, apart from the spread of AIDS,? said deputy director (conservancy) Swapan Mahapatra.

There is an Anti-Vagrancy Act and a full-fledged section attached to the Calcutta Police enforcement branch to carry out operations against vagrants, but the police are not doing their duty, mayor Mukherjee alleged.

He said: ?Police inaction has encouraged ragpickers, poor people from the districts and even from Bangladesh to come and settle on the pavements of Calcutta.?

Senior police officers attached to the enforcement branch, however, asserted that anti-vagrancy drives are conducted whenever the senior municipal magistrate of the vagrancy court sets a date.

?The last drive was conducted on March 10, and 68 vagrants, including nine women, were picked up and produced at a court held at a vagrancy home in Dhakuria,? said deputy commissioner of police (enforcement branch) R.K. Adhikari. ?Of these, 21 people, including one woman, were released the same day,? he added.

?Initiating drives against pavement-dwellers is no solution to the problem because these people are forced to live on the streets and are a social responsibility. Even when we do pick them up under Section VI of the Bengal Vagrancy Act, they do not just vanish into the thin air. They are sent to vagrant homes, where there is, again, a dearth of space,? a senior police officer reasoned.