Hawkers are back on a stretch of a road behind Nazrul Tirtha that was cleared of encroachments around three months back.
The hawkers were shifted to a temporary market complex nearby in August.
Shacks and stalls made of flammable items like bamboo, plastic sheets and plywood have mushroomed across New Town.
These stalls eat into the walkways, boulevards and portions of the roads of the planned township, which has a mix of housing complexes, offices and commercial buildings interspersed with parks and wide roads.
In order to reclaim the walkways, the New Town Kolkata Development Authority has built multiple temporary markets across New Town where the hawkers are being allocated stalls.
However, after a few days of being shifted, most hawkers quietly creep back to the pavements.
In August, the New Town authorities had shifted more than 60 hawkers from the road behind Nazrul Tirtha in Action Area I and allotted them stalls inside the temporary market complex beside the office of New Town’s deputy commissioner.
The hawkers who had been relocated would sell their wares on the main road behind Nazrul Tirtha, which leads to the Rail Vihar Housing Complex.
A numbers of hawkers are now back on the pavements from where they were shifted. There are some new entrants on cycle vans that are parked on the road leading to Nazrul Tirtha from the Rail Vihar Housing complex.
Last week, The Telegraph had driven around New Town and saw how small bazaars had mushroomed all over the planned township.
The AF Block has more than 300 stalls encroaching on pavements and roads. Many of these stalls eat into bicycle lanes. Some hawkers set up stalls on the road and eat into a sizeable chunk of the carriageway.
The hawkers who had set up stalls along the median divider in front of the Candor IT Park had been shifted to a temporary market complex set up by the NKDA several months ago. The divider was free of hawkers when this newspaper visited the place last week.
A senior official of the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) said they were keeping an eye on the developments.
“We are aware that stalls are being set up by some hawkers in the spaces that we have just cleared. We are keeping an eye on them and we are also forming a New Town Vending Committee that will help us regulate hawkers,” he said.
Shaktiman Ghosh, president of Hawker Sangram Samiti, said the hawker relocation should be done in such a way that an entire section of a walkway is freed up all at once.
“Although hawking on pavements is allowed across the world, if rehabilitation is the only solution left, then all the hawkers who operate stalls on a particular stretch should be shifted all at once. Otherwise, it creates a situation where some people might get an undue advantage over their fellow hawkers. We are not averse to the rehabilitation and relocation, but the NKDA and the cops should ensure that no new hawkers occupy the vacated spots,” said Ghosh.
