NMC yet to select open spaces for street hawkers

Nagpur: Despite the central government guidelines, Nagpur Municipal Corporation has failed to identify open spaces for

hawkers

in any of its 10 zones. As a result, roads in both

commercial

and

residential

areas are turning into hawking zones. After some preliminary moves initiated by NMC to implement the national policy on urban

street

vendors, which has since become an Act, there appears to be no further move to regulate street vending in the city. The corporation has carried out a survey of street vendors in the city and was supposed to notify hawking zones. All other places in the city are to be treated as non-hawking zones. Even the then municipal commissioner Shyam Wardhane had issued directives to all zonal assistant municipal commissioners to recognises street vending as an integral part of the urban retail trade and provide street vendors legal status. Street vendors are to be enumerated prabhag-wise and each street vendor will be registered by the town hawking committee and issued an identity card. Assistant commissioners are to provide a range of civic services to street vendors, including allocation of designated areas for trade, but they have miserably failed to follow the directives as could be seen on various roads and footpaths across the city. TOI on Wednesday surveyed many parts of the city and found not only footpaths but also roads occupied by the encroachers. “With this casual approach of the BJP-ruled NMC, hawkers in the city are ruining the wide roads,” alleged social activist and secretary of Parivartan The Citizens Forum Dinesh Naidu. “We are not against hawkers who want to earn a living, but it should not come at the cost of encroachments on roads. Just because there is some open space left, doesn’t mean you just occupy it,” he pointed out blaming the failure of the civic body to allocate places for hawkers. A senior official from NMC’s market department admitted the delay on part of NMC and blamed it on zonal assistant municipal commissioners. He, however, claimed the civic body had once again started the process to identify hawking zones as per the survey carried out in 2014-15. He said the market department in coordination with the Dhantoli zone had shortlisted a portion of Nag river and another at Gawlipura for developing as hawkers zones. If finalized, hawkers from Sitabuldi could be shifted there, the officer said. He clarified that many lands reserved for hawkers zone had either been encroached or deleted from reservations. He failed to provide list of places reserved for hawkers zones.