In keeping with his one-step-forward-and-three-steps-back policy on hawkers, mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya’s latest move to restore the right of way to pedestrians and motorists is yet to kick off.

The mayor had announced on Tuesday that a week-long campaign would start on Wednesday to persuade hawkers to remove their wares from carriageways and pavements.

From next Thursday, civic personnel would confiscate items found encroaching on roads or more than one-third of the pavements, the mayor had asserted.

Till late on Wednesday, there was no sign of the curb-hawker campaign on the kerb.

The mayor’s persistent failure in tackling the hawker menace becomes apparent if one goes over his moves since February, when he had announced that a panel would be set up to monitor whether hawkers were occupying space beyond the permissible limit.

Bhattacharyya had also said that by April, the hawkers would, on their own, remove permanent structures, not sit within 50 m of intersections, not occupy more than one-third of the pavement, and replace plastic or tarpaulin sheets covering the wares with colourful umbrellas.

He backtracked in May, when he accepted the hawker leaders’ request to extend the deadline till post-Puja. The cut-off date was pushed back further, in view of the other festivals.

In November, the mayor realised once more that something had to be done and so he called a meeting of hawker leaders on Tuesday and decided on the week-long awareness campaign, starting Wednesday. The moral science classes also seem to be a non-starter.

Bhattacharyya’s see-saw hawker policy has drawn these questions from predecessor Subrata Mukherjee:

• Since encroachment is illegal, how can hawker encroachment on one-third of the pavement be legal?

• Why should pedestrians be forced to share pavement space with hawkers, without any referendum?

• Do permanent structures mean only those made of bricks?

“The proposal of a committee monitoring the hawkers is an eyewash,” Mukherjee told Metro, while commenting on the plight of the pedestrian.