Two city corporations of Dhaka, literally, are in the soup. They are having a tough time in their bids to right a few wrongs. They have been facing strong resistance from the traders involved in both small and medium scale business activities.
The Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) has embarked on a truly hard job of clearing vendors from the pavements in Gulistan and Motijheel areas in particular with a view to making those accessible to pedestrians. Hundreds of vendors occupy the pavements making them inaccessible to pedestrians. This is a problem city people have been facing for decades. There have been sporadic efforts to drive the vendors out of the footpaths. But within a day or two the vendors would return to the usual venues with their makeshift shops.
The incumbent mayor of the DSCC has vowed to keep the footpaths free from hawkers. About a month back when there was an attempt to clean the footpaths, hawkers had clashed with the police and some ruling party supporters. Open display of firearms by a couple of leaders of the student wing of the ruling party during the clash had undermined a right move, to some extent.
Though the hawkers have not turned violent during the ongoing eviction drive, they are organising demonstrations against the DSCC actions. The public is also sceptical about the outcome of the ongoing drive to make the pavements vendor-free. Going by their past experiences, they tend to believe that within days, the vendors would return to pavements following intervention by some invisible hands.
Vendors say they would not occupy pavements provided they are rehabilitated. Rehabilitating such a large army of vendors is almost an impossible task. The hawkers are not ready to go to weekly markets organised on weekends as they want to continue with daily trading operations at 'suitable' places. They are willing to do trading at crowded areas of the city.
Looking at the problem from a humanitarian angle, one can hardly ignore the demands of the street vendors. But the fact remains that it is really difficult to meet the vendors' demands by the DSCC. The truth is that all concerned have allowed the problem of hawking at the sidewalks to grow from big to bigger. If they have been tough on the issue of unauthorised occupation of footpaths from the beginning, the situation would not have reached such a state.
The Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) is facing a different sort of problem. It has engaged in a row with the traders operating legally at 12 of its markets. The DNCC want to carry out repair/ retrofitting/demolition of those markets that have been found in dilapidated conditions. The remediation works necessitates evacuation of traders. But the traders would not do so until they are rehabilitated. The Rajdhani Unnyan Kartipakkha (Rajuk) has also identified those markets as unsafe. DNCC mayor Annisul Huq held a face-to-face meeting with the traders of the markets in question on Tuesday, but nothing positive, reportedly, had come out of it. At the meeting, the DNCC mayor posed a question to the traders -- who will take the responsibility in the event of any accident happened to the risky buildings? There was no answer from the opposite side, for obvious reasons.
These traders also wanted rehabilitation before they leave the 'risky' markets. It would be really hard for the DNCC to meet such a demand. So, the problem remains unresolved.
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