With an aim to decongest the streets and roads, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has finally prepared a ward-wise list of designated hawking zones, non-hawking zones and restricted zones across the city.
The proposed list has been prepared after consulting the traffic and the city police departments. Ready to face backlash from all the stakeholders concerned, the civic body's primary focus at present is to seek approvals at different levels to roll out the plan smoothly.
As the civic body has deleted several popular areas where hawkers make brisk business by making them non-hawking zones and added quite a few new roads as hawking zones, it fears that there would be backlash from the hawkers' unions, residents' associations and civic activists.
Before implementing the project, the proposed list will have to pass three litmus tests in order — approvals from municipal commissioner, Town Vending Committee and the general body of the elected representatives.
BG Pawar, deputy municipal commissioner and in-charge of co-ordination between all the 24 ward level committees working on the subject, said that as per the Supreme Court order hawkers have a right to earn. "So, we have to allow them, but they cannot inconvenience other citizens and obstruct their life. As per the SC order, only one person from a the family is allowed to hawk provided he is the sole earning member of the family," said Pawar.
A civic official said, "The list is prepared with a holistic view, keeping in mind all the parameters of each ward. We have taken opinions of local the police, traffic authorities and our own roads and traffic department. Width of the roads, width of the footpaths, people's convenience-inconvenience, traffic congestion, footfalls in the area, each of these factors have been considered while designating the hawking, non-hawking and restricted zones. In the new list, we have carefully avoided the hawkers in areas where there is turning of roads, also on side of the roads and not outside any shop so that the entrance to the shop is hindered."
Use of technology
BMC had issued more than 1.28 lakh forms for hawkers' registration. However, it received only 99,000 forms in return. These forms will be scrutinised. "We are getting a sophisticated software which will scrutinise all the documents submitted by the hawkers for license. Finally, during the execution of the project, we will issue ID cards to all hawkers and we will have back-up records. Also, geo-fencing of the space provided to each hawker will be done. Satellite mapping and lots of other things will be taken up to ensure that hawkers don't spread their space and start encroaching.
The silver lining
The hawking zones, non-hawking zones and the restricted area (which means the hawking will be allowed only during restricted time) are decided according to the necessity of each area, so that bottlenecks due to presence of hawkers are decongested. Also, at one point, only 25 hawkers will be allowed on one stretch so that the patch doesn't look cluttered. For example, there is not a single hawking zone in Ward 227 of A-ward of South Mumbai (RC Church – Colaba Dandi – Navy Nagar). At the same time, the Fort-CST area has more than 5,000 hawker pitches in the proposed list. Likewise, in P-North ward in suburban Malad (East and West), only 11 out of 118 roads are completely non-hawking zone. "But these 11 roads include all the major roads outside the railway station in the west side of the suburb leading to SV Road, Rani Sati Marg, Link Road, SV Road, Daftary Road (in Malad East) leading to Western Express Highway. This should reduce a lot of traffic jams and reduce inconvenience to the people," said an official from P- North ward.
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