The Oxford English Dictionary defines the pavement as “a raised paved or asphalted path for pedestrians at the side of a road”.

The CPM-led Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) would rather define the pavement as “a raised paved or asphalted path for hawkers at the side of a road”.

With hawkers poised to gain permanent-settlement status on one-third of every pavement, where does the poor pedestrian go?

“Hawkers will soon take over the entire pavement and pedestrians will be forced to step on to the road, risking their lives,” warned former mayor Subrata Mukherjee.

That the pavement will no longer remain the preserve of the pedestrian was clear when Metro visited stretches in the central business district where the Lakshmanrekha has been painted on the pavements to keep the hawkers within the one-third line.

Significantly, the thin white line on Bentinck Street and near Metro cinema at Esplanade had already been blurred by Tuesday afternoon.

“The move to confine the hawkers within the Lakshmanrekha will also fade away and then there will be no stopping hawker raj,” complained a police official struggling to cope with car crush and pedestrian pressure at Esplanade.

The plight of the pedestrian was best highlighted on a Bentinck Street stretch, where the pavement measured 12 ft wide. One set of hawkers took up one-third of space bordering the street (legitimately, according to mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya) while another set “illegally” took up another one-third of the same pavement, bordering the buildings. That left a mere 4 ft in the middle for pedestrians to wriggle their way through.

“We have been told by the Hawker Sangram Committee that this space now belongs to us and we do not have to fear anyone, not even police,” declared a hawker at Esplanade.

He, of course, could not be bothered about the directive to stay 50 ft clear of a major intersection.