Hawkers may get a better deal in Coimbatore

Corporation to prepare comprehensive street vending plan

Hawkers will soon have better infrastructure and government benefits after the Coimbatore Corporation completes hawkers' enumeration. Photo:M.Periasamy.

If all goes well, hawkers and street vendors will get to see the Coimbatore Corporation helping them in business by providing infrastructure and get benefits out of social security schemes.

Towards identifying hawkers and understanding their needs, the Corporation will soon begin an enumeration exercise, for which it will pay around a private agency over Rs. 100 a hawker. The civic body passed a resolution in this regard at the last Council meeting.

The resolution says that the civic body will fund the enumeration under the National Urban Livelihood Mission scheme of the Central Government.

Commissioner K. Vijayakarthikeyan says that the Corporation’s aim is to prepare a comprehensive street vending plan so as to benefit vendors and members of the public.

The enumeration exercise will collect details like the type of products sold, place of sale, time of sale, the name and family details of the vendors, type of benefits they draw at present from government schemes and their requirements.

Based on this the civic body will decide on the type of infrastructure the vendors need, skill development they require, credit linking required, if any, etc.

But this is not the first time that the Corporation has embarked on such an exercise.

In 2011-12 it carried out such an exercise with the IC Centre for Governance, a non-government organisation.

S. Baskar of the Centre says that after the last enumeration exercise, the Corporation issued identity cards to the vendors, attempted at earmarking their place of sale and took steps to provide basic infrastructure.

It also set up the Town Vending Committee, which identified green, yellow and red zones across the city. In green zones, vendors will be allowed to do business without restriction. In yellow zones, they can do business but with restriction as those places will see peak traffic during certain hours of a day and red zones are no vending zones.

The effort did not go farther as officials got transferred and there was no political will, he recalls and points out that this time though, the exercise should not meet the same fate.