Sanwar Hossain :
The traditional ‘hustle and bustle’ centering footpath business at Motijheel, Paltan, Gulistan and other areas in the capital has returned to the previous state, though the Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) carried out eviction drives on several times in the recent past.
Then the pavements of the areas were seen free from footpath vendors helping easy movement of pedestrians as well as vehicles on roads in those areas.
But nowadays, it seems the DSCC’s mission has totally failed. Now pedestrians often struggle to walk on the footpaths, as those always remain occupied by enormous makeshift shops, vendors and hawkers, thanks to the authorities concerned for showing tolerance to such illegal trading.
The footpath grabbers are still doing their business in full vigour as if they have returned to their heavens, despite the DSCC’s eviction drives and rehabilitation programmes.
While visiting the city’s Gulistan, Paltan, Motijheel and New Market areas, this correspondent found that hawkers once evicted by the DSCC returned to their old places. Officials of DSCC looked helpless when contacted and said that they were still looking for sustainable strategies to solve the problem.
Chief Executive Officer of DSCC Khan Md Billal said, they are trying to keep footpaths free of vendors but in vain. DSCC has taken different initiatives like holiday markets, rehabilitation programme to send hawkers in the foreign countries with jobs, but getting cool response from them. We are looking for more sustainable strategies to rehabilitate hawkers of the city.
“DSCC is keen to keep footpaths free, everyday evicting hawkers from footpaths, but eviction is not sustaining in the long run, they are coming back again,” said Khan Md Billal.
“There are politically backed people, middle men associated with the business. Besides, there are pressures against evection without rehabilitation from different human rights group, NGOs and left political parties. Still we are continuing eviction drive and it is a continuous process,” Billal mentioned.
“DSCC lacks adequate workforce to do so. It is our duty to evict hawkers but it is law enforcer’s responsibility to keep illegal grabbers out of there after eviction,” he added.
Nesar Hossain, a private company employee told The New Nation that it is difficult to move smoothly through the footpaths because a very narrow space left for pedestrians to move.
“Makeshift shops have grabbed maximum space displaying their products in the footpaths especially in the commercial areas. So pedestrians choose to walk by the roads to reach their destiny rather footpaths,” he said.
Razzak Mollah, a fruit seller at Gulistan said there is no alternative available for them without doing makeshift shops on the footpath.
“We earn our bread by doing this business here, if we are evicted from here, there are no way for us to survive,” Razzak said.
Monir Hossain, an eye-glass seller at Paltan area said also the same thing, adding we pay regular donation to the local political leaders as well as the law enforcers to run our business on footpath.
“We need to survive and do the business. If authority rehabilitates us we will go there but we cannot survive if we get evicted from here,” Monir said
DSCC on January 11 2017 after a meeting with pro-government vendors’ leaders, law enforcers and other public officials announced that it would not allow any vendor in Gulistan and its adjacent areas during office hours.
Over a thousand of vendors under the banner of Hawkers Somonnoy Parishad protested eviction and demanded a stop to the eviction drive without prior rehabilitation.
According to the announcement, vendors will only be allowed at Gulistan after 6:30pm on weekdays.
But the vendors said that they would get hardly any customer in the evening, especially in the winter.
While contacted, Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) Chief Estate Officer Aminul Islam told The New Nation that they evict vendors during development works and vendors come back again when development works ends.
“We have not taken any eviction drive to evict vendors from DNCC footpaths yet and decision should come from the board meeting to do so,” Aminul Islam mentioned.
“DSCC took the eviction programme, there is no recent plan to evict such shops from the DNCC footpaths,” he added.
