The town vending committee of Calcutta has decided to start drives in the New Market area to remove hawkers who have set up stalls on roads.

The street vending rules, notified by the state government in 2018, prohibited hawkers from setting up stalls on a road. It said hawkers can set up stalls only within one-third width of a pavement, leaving two-thirds free for pedestrians. The town vending committee, which has been empowered by The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 to regulate hawkers in a city or town, too gave its approval to these two rules.

In New Market, however, violation of these rules is routine. Hawkers have set up stalls on several roads in the New Market area - Bertram Street, Lindsay Street and Humayun Place. A walk through the roads reveal that there are two layers of hawkers on Bertram Street and Humayun Place. On Humayun Place there are some hawkers on the pavement and some others on the road. At Bertram Street, there are stalls at the wall of New Market and another layer of hawkers on the road in front of them.

"Our customers cannot park their cars in the parking zones because hawkers have set up stalls in spaces allotted for car parking. They have even encroached the gates of New Market. Our business suffers because of them not following any rules," said a trader at the 150-year-old New Market.

On Sunday, Debashis Kumar, the mayoral council member of Kolkata Municipal Corporation dealing with hawker related matters said that a drive will be undertaken soon to remove all hawkers from roads.

"A drive to remove all stalls on the road will be done soon. These kind of drives cannot stop and must be conducted at regular intervals. It could be that hawkers set up stalls at New Market once again, but the drives have to clear the roads time and again," he said.

"The hawkers who have set up stalls on the road have to wait till the town vending committee allots them space on a pavement. This could be away from New Market, but they cannot sit on the road," said Kumar, who is also the co-chairperson of Calcutta's town vending committee.

In June last year, the Kolkata Police had removed all hawkers who had set up stalls on the road at Humayun Place. Police took about an hour to restore Humayun Place to a thoroughfare minus the layers and layers of hawkers’ stalls that occupied it.

The drive followed chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s outburst at the police and a section of politicians whose connivance, she said, had made the city ugly.

“Officials, police, all: a group has formed. Wherever there is free land, you are helping in its encroachment. I can see (encroachments) whenever I am on the road. The police cannot see. They have blindfolded themselves,” Mamata had said during a meeting at Nabanna earlier in the week where ministers, heads of civic bodies, police officers and senior bureaucrats were present.

But the hawkers gradually returned on the roads.

The matter has been made worse by multiple hawker unions holding sway of small groups of hawkers in the New Market. The Lindsay Street Hawkers Union, the North and Central Progressive Hawkers Union, the New Market Suraksha Union and the Hawker Sangram Committee each have their own followers. The groups are often at conflict with each other.