Hawkers of Gariahat prevented the inauguration of a 36,000-sq-ft Spencer’s store on Rashbehari Avenue on Friday, saying they would all be wiped out if a hypermart competed with them for customers.
Around 100 members of the Hawkers’ Sangram Committee assembled in front of the store around 9.30am, two hours before the scheduled arrival of the RPG Enterprises vice-chairman, Sanjiv Goenka. The police team that was deployed there could do little when more hawkers joined the group and stopped Goenka from entering the store to inaugurate it.
There was no violence, but the protesters made a bonfire of Spencer’s handbills. A couple of lights were broken, too, and one of the metallic letters of the address on one gate was wrenched off.
Spencer’s, the retail arm of the RPG Group, is the second food retail chain after Reliance Fresh to face the wrath of the city’s unorganised retailers.
“Once a store like this opens, 6,000 hawkers (operating along the stretch from Ballygunge railway station to Chetla bridge) will be out of employment within a year. We will not allow this to happen and will keep on protesting every time they try and open this store,” said Shaktiman Ghosh, the general secretary of the National Hawkers’ Federation and the committee that organised the protest.
With the hawkers refusing to disperse, the launch of the store was deferred to an unannounced date. Kanchan Naha, the officer-in-charge of Gariahat police station, said the RPG Group did not lodge an official complaint. “Nobody was arrested because there wasn’t any complaint.”
Goenka pointed out that Spencer’s was not a threat to “traditional” trade. “We would like to emphasise that organised retail forms only 3-4 per cent of the total food and grocery retail opportunities in India. This is not a threat to traditional trade. In fact, for more than 13 years now, we have peacefully co-existed with traditional trade. We believe this is because of the difference in product range and services we offer to our consumers,” he said.
RPG will meet the hawkers in a day or two to sort out the issue, a company official said.
