The town vending committee of Kolkata has decided that they will neither move hawkers beyond 5ft on both sides of the entrance to The Oberoi Grand nor declare the Grand Arcade a “no-vending zone”, committee members and officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said.
Lawyers representing The Oberoi Grand and an official of the hotel had raised the demands last month — that at least 22ft on both sides of the hotel’s entrance should be free of hawkers and the Grand Arcade should be a “no-vending zone”. They placed the demands at a meeting of the vending committee held at the KMC headquarters.
The committee, which met again earlier this month, decided to maintain the status quo in the arcade.
“We have decided that there will be no change from what is at the Grand Arcade now. We have communicated our decision to the representatives of The Oberoi Grand,” said Debashis Kumar, a mayoral council member of KMC and co-chairperson of the city’s town vending committee.
“We cannot declare the arcade a no-vending zone. Hawkers are now sitting 5ft away from the gate of the hotel. Things will remain as they are,” a KMC official said.
A 2014 act that aims to regulate hawkers and also ensure livelihoods defined a no-vending zone as: “Where any area or space, as the case may be, has been earmarked as no-vending zone, no street vendor shall carry out any vending activities in that zone.”
The Telegraph emailed a spokesperson of the hotel on Tuesday asking if they would challenge the committee’s decision, but there was no response till evening.
In November, Justice Amrita Sinha of Calcutta High Court had asked the committee to ensure that two-thirds of the pavement in front of the hotel was left free for pedestrians.
Before the high court’s order, the Grand Arcade pavement had barely 3ft left for pedestrians on some stretches. Following the high court’s order, the KMC and police swung into action and drew a yellow line on the pavement marking the one-third space for hawkers.
Shaktiman Ghosh, a hawker leader and member of the committee, said 116 hawkers have stalls in the arcade. “It is not possible to declare the pavement a no-vending zone,” he said.
The owner of a shop in the Grand Arcade said initially the hawkers would sit on the pavement and flee when the police came. In the mid-2000s, “some stalls were set up”. “The numbers grew rapidly after 2010,” he said.
The late Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi, then executive chairman of EIH Limited, the owner of The Oberoi Grand, had spoken about the encroachment of the arcade in 2018.
