hawkers - gist of the recommendations
The Supreme Court Guidelines are
the following:
a) Roads and footpaths are for commuting.
Hawking is not a fundamental right. Hawkers can not claim a right
to any public place.
b) Mumbai to be divided into
Hawking Zones, Prohibited Zones, and Rest of the City.
c) Hawking zones to have demarcated
pitches on roads selected as per stated criteria. This would
accomodate around 23,000 hawkers, selected by lottery every year.
Anyone can apply.
d) In prohibited zones e.g. around
railway stations, hospitals, schools, colleges, religious places,
high-security places, no hawking to be permitted.
e) Elsewhere in the city, roving
hawkers to be freely allowed. No limit on numbers. Anyone can get
a licence. Such roving hawkers can not sit or squat.
It is this last point that is greatly
worrying.
In practice, it is fairly obvious
that roving hawkers will sit or stand at any place they like to
sell their goods. BMC and police will not be able to enforce the
law. Firstly, they do not have the required number of people. Secondly,
a hawker will either run away or bribe his way out or say that he
was only stopping and not sitting / standing (similar to drivers
say that they are stopping and not parking). Moreover, if there
is no limit on numbers, the situation will become a nightmare.
So our broad recommendations are
on the following lines:
a) In areas other than hawking,
and no-hawking, hawking to be allowed in 'temporarily' demarcated
spots / stretches.
b) The number of hawkers, timings,
types of goods sold, etc. to be as decided by a broad-based Ward
Hawker Committee in each ward.
c) The number of hawkers to be upto
1 per 1000 adult population i.e. upto 50 per Councillor Ward.
d) Other special ways to hawk to
be looked into, e.g. hawkers plazas / markets, weekly bazaars, khau
gallis, in private premises, festival licences, etc. as decided
by the Ward Hawker Committee.
e) To avoid unnecessarily receiving
an unmanageable number of applications every year, criteria
such as eligibility (domicile), conditions (type of goods), and
preferences (disabled, women above 50, men above 60), and recommendations from
nearby residents (for 'temporary' areas) to be included.
f) Strictly roving hawkers i.e.
who engage in door-to-door service need not have to get a licence,
as they are using the roads / footpaths for transportation just
as delivery-boys do, and not for selling. (There to, however, be
an enabling clause for licences for the future.) This also accomodates
the remainder of the existing hawkers.
g) A City Hawker Committee to oversee
the overall implementation and co-ordination and supervision of
the 24 Ward Hawker Committees.
The detailed recommendations follow.
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