Salt Lake: Pavements rid of illegal stalls in two rounds of eviction since last week are being repaired by the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation with a sense of urgency matching the mayor's promise to quickly give back pedestrians their pathways.

Police teams have been deployed in front of Anandalok Hospital and the Geological Survey of India's office building in DK Block to prevent hawkers from returning to their old spots.

Mayor Sabyasachi Dutta, also the MLA of Rajarhat New Town, has said that all pavements reclaimed from hawkers will be rebuilt. "We are going to repair and renovate all such pavements. We will beautify them and place guardrails along them. The budget for the project is around Rs 18 crore," he told Metro.

Two hydraulic earthmovers and a contingent of corporation workers on Sunday razed at least 80 illegal stalls that had sprung back on a pavement and a service lane in DK Block after being demolished once before in the run-up to the FIFA U-17 World Cup.

On Monday, masons started laying kerbstones on a pavement in front of Vidyut Bhavan near the Karunamoyee bus stop, where 14 concrete structures and 100 stalls had been removed from a 500m stretch of pavement during a nightlong drive on December 12.

Along the boundary wall of the Karunamoyee Housing Estate, where hawkers selling everything from pirated DVDs to fruit used to do business until recently, another team of workers was removing debris from the pavement and shovelling sand into the gaps.

A corporation official said interlocking paved blocks would be placed atop the layer of sand to create a more durable and aesthetically pleasing pathway.

A 1km stretch of pavement near the Punjab National Bank bus stop in Sector I is also being repaired.

To ensure that the hawkers do not return to their old spots and set up temporary stalls, the Bidhannagar police commissionerate is deploying teams in shifts. "We chased a few of them away last night when they came on bicycles to reclaim their places," an officer said.

Debanjana Ghosh, a resident of EE Block, said she hadn't seen an entire pavement free of encroachments for as long as she could remember.