Two days before the third anniversary of Operation Sunshine, the drive that cleared many city roads of hawkers, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation is being armtwisted to legalise peddling through the backdoor. The corporation is likely to create fee hawking zones, like fee parking zones, to accommodate most of the nearly 80,000 hawkers across the city. The CMC?s plan is to legalise hawking without handing out licences and raise a sizeable amount of money every year. ?Over 80,000 hawkers are doing business in the 141 wards and even if Rs 20 is charged from each daily, we stand to earn Rs 50 crore annually,? a CMC revenue officer said. ?Our brief is to identify the areas where hawkers are already in business. They have to play hide-and-seek with the police even after paying bribes. We will demarcate these areas as approved fee hawking zones,? a senior official said on condition of anonymity. In effect, this means the hafta, the regular bribe mostly charged by police constables, will have to make way for a fee levied by the corporation. On November 24, 1996, the government had reined in Left parties and trade unions to enable the civic authorities and the police to rid all major roads of hawkers? illegally-built stalls. Three years later, nobody in the government wants to talk of Operation Sunshine?s third anniversary. ?We are looking at different possible scenarios, keeping their (hawkers?) welfare uppermost in our minds,? said Mayor Prasanta Chatterjee who has been criticised in the CPM?s Calcutta district committee. ?Forget Sunshine, it is past. Make arrangments to bring them back,? the CDC is believed to have told him. Apparently, the government has now given its nod to a comeback by hawkers under pressure from the CPM?s Calcutta district committee and the party?s labour wing, Citu. ?I will not comment (on fee hawking zones),? said Ashok Bhattacharya, urban development minister. ?Our stated position is that the hawkers displaced in Operation Sunshine will have to accept our terms for rehabilitation.? The Leftists, who currently run the CMC on a wafer-thin margin, are worried by the possibility of an upset in the civic elections due in early 2000. They have been urging the government to work out a rehabilitation scheme that would appease the hawkers. They argue that the hawkers, who till the other day formed the Left parties? votebank, be brought back to take on the strong challenge being posed by the Trinamul Congress-BJP combine. The party and the Citu rationalise their stand by pointing to the defeat of Kanti Ganguly (to Trinamul?s Krishna Bose) in the Lok Sabha poll. Ganguly, the mayor-in-council in charge of conservancy, had overseen the execution of Sunshine three years ago. The party attributes his defeat in the Jadavpur seat to the backlash of the operation. Going by reports, the operation had only benefitted the police . Three years after Sunshine, what the hawkers? union lost in the swings it stands to gain in the roundabout if the CMC?s measures come into effect. The hawkers who did business on 21 major roads before Sunshine might be able to swamp the city after paying a token amount in fees. ?We think the hawkers can be alloted fixed spaces on pavements against fees which they are in any case paying as bribes to different agencies,? said Chanchal Ghosh, a CPI member of the Mayor?s council. ?The idea is workable. After all, the parking slots operate on the same basis. The fear that they might try to permanently occupy the spaces by setting up stalls is misplaced. We will keep a watch on them. Let us accept hawkers as a reality. There are hawkers even in Singapore and Hong Kong.? The leader of the Hawker Sangram Committee, Shaktiman Ghosh, welcoming the idea, said: ?It gives us an opportunity to become a party responsible for the development of the city. Otherwise, police will continue to extort us.? It is strange that little effort has been made to rehabilitate hawkers without allowing them to choke traffic. Despite the state government?s repeated threat that it would auction newly-built stalls meant for their rehabilitation, hawkers have not budged from their demand: that they be allowed to carry on business as they would like to. Barring the 200-odd hawkers of Gariahat and about 100 in Entally, none have moved to the new stalls. The market on Galiff Street is ready and new complexes are being built in Gol Park, Ultadanga and Kalighat.