The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : What the committees say about hawkers

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Tuesday, Jul 29, 2008
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Tamil Nadu - Chennai

What the committees say about hawkers

A. Srivathsan

Chennai is yet to take up a comprehensive survey of hawkers

— Photo: S.S. Kumar

ROADSIDE PEDDLERS: Demarcation of hawking spaces and effective implementation continue to be a challenge. A view of hawkers along the Jeenis Road in Saidapet.

Chennai: The Justice Kanagaraj committee report submitted in 2003 outlines the plan to relocate and regulate hawkers in Chennai. This committee surveyed the 10 Corporation zones and gave recommendations for 35 streets in all.

While hawkers on a few streets are regulated and accommodated on the same streets, others were recommended to be shifted and relocated in commercial complexes built for them. The committee recommended that licences be issued to identified hawkers and those without licence were to be evicted.

This report was a modified version of Justice Abdul Hadi Committee (2001) that preceded it.

The Hadi committee recommended that hawkers be banned on 49 roads in Chennai and in places where hawkers were allowed, five-feet-by-four-feet space was to be allocated for each one of them.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s Office in 2003 had conceived a large scheme to divide cities into red areas where hawking was prohibited, green areas where hawking would have no restrictions and amber areas where it was restricted. A draft ‘National Policy on Street Vendors’ was also circulated by the Ministry of Urban Development and Poverty alleviation in 2003 for comments.

Vending committees

The core recommendation of the policy is the constitution of Town Vending Committees (TVC) for every ward in municipal Corporations. This committee will be made responsible for allocating spaces in each of the wards based on the local conditions and “take corrective action against deviant hawkers”.

It also recommended comprehensive citywise survey of hawker locations by professional institutions and proactive allocation of new hawking areas in growing and new parts of the city.

The Supreme Court judgment in 2007 on the Mumbai Corporation’s hawker settlement case has clarified that the State Government can frame regulations in order to solve problems of hawkers “independently without being influenced by any scheme framed by the Court” and “schemes and directions issued by the court are purely temporary in nature”.

Chennai is yet to constitute TVCs and take up a comprehensive survey of hawkers.

Corporation Commissioner Rajesh Lakhoni said that the Justice Kanagaraj Committee and the Justice Ramamurthy Implementation Committee formed the basis of hawker regulation in Chennai.

The Justice Ramamurthy Committee was formed by the High Court to implement and monitor the Kanagaraj Committee recommendations.

Mr.Lakhoni said that “as far as the existing city is concerned, the land value is high and unless incentives such as transfer of development rights are brought in, the Chennai Corporation cannot use land carved from existing buildings and wide pavements for street vendors.”

Transfer of development rights means making available certain amount of additional built-up area in lieu of the area relinquished or surrendered by the owner of the land.

In sofar as new locations in growing parts of the city are concerned, he is handicapped by the lack of definition of street hawkers and survey, Mr. Lakhoni added.

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