Kolkata: Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has completed the survey of hawkers in the city and will submit the report to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee by next week. As many as 55,600 hawkers have been identified during the exercise.
“We have used an app developed by the state Information Technology (IT) department to geo-tag or geo-fence genuine hawkers to a particular hawking zone. The app has stored the information about the stalls and the name of the hawker along with his or her picture and the information has been linked with Aadhaar. The Aadhaar-linking will ensure that one person does not have more than one stall in the city, as per instructions by the Chief Minister,” said Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim. The hawker survey was done with the assistance of the local police station. “The roads with black tops have been marked as non-hawking zones and the survey did not encompass these places. But there are a good number of hawkers on these roads who had applied for licenses in 2015 when the last survey was undertaken. Their fate will be uncertain,” said Saktiman Ghosh, a member of the Town Vending Committee (TVC).
Ghosh alleged that the lanes and bylanes in the city have also not been properly covered during the exercise. “There are 1865 non-hawking zones in the city in which there are hawkers who had applied for the license in 2015 when the survey was held last time,” he added. The genuine hawkers will be given vending certificates by the TVC and will tie them to a specific vending spot. This, said KMC sources, would curb uncontrolled hawker influx and prevent the sub-letting or sale of pavement space, often against an exorbitant amount.