Fruit stalls on a Boring Road footpath. Picture by Ashok Sinha

Vendors have elbowed out pedestrians from pavements along Boring Road to the street, slamming brakes on already sluggish traffic movement on the busy thoroughfare.

Pragya Mishra experiences the fallout everyday while bringing home her seven-year-old daughter Shatakshi from school. The 3km journey home from Loyola School takes her around 25 minutes in an autorickshaw. Had the pedestrians not been robbed of the footpaths, the journey time would have been halved.

“Most of the footpaths are encroached upon by hawkers, compelling pedestrians to take the road. I personally face a tough time when I go to bring Shatakshi from Loyala High School where she studies in Class I. Only on rare occasions, we are not caught in jams. Shatakshi gets irritated sitting in the autorickshaw and I feel helpless at times. Why can’t the municipal body evict vendors from the footpaths along the Boring Road? There are many schools in Pataliputra and Digha and children suffer because of the vendors,” said Mishra, a resident of Boring Road.

BCom Part-III student of BD Evening College Rajnish Kumar was visibly disappointed with the encroachment on Boring Road. “Pedestrians can be hit by vehicles while walking on streets because of footpaths being encroached upon by vendors”

Twenty-one-year-old Aman Kumar said: “Footpath to dikhta hi nahi hai vendors ke chalte hamein to road pe chalna parta hai (Footpath is not visible because of vendors and we are forced to take the road). Patna Municipal Corporation officials have nothing to do with our problems. They just sit in their air-conditioned offices and we, the common people, have to face problems because of the laxity on their part.”

Patna Municipal Corporation officials cited the same old reason for not being able to evict vendors. “We don’t have the support of police or magistrate to carry out anti-encroachment drive. As soon as we get force, we will initiate our anti-encroachment drive,” said Vishal Anand, the executive officer of New Capital circle, PMC.

Anand, however, fumbled on the number of vendors on the stretch. “We don’t have records regarding the number of vendors present in the area. The only thing we know is that the number of vendors increases on the stretch during the evening,” he said.