The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has stated that they will be increasing the charges for hawkers. According to the proposed tariffs, mobile hawkers will be charged ₹50 instead of ₹25 a month, while hawkers with handcarts will be charged ₹140 monthly instead of ₹70. Hawkers given pitches on footpaths will have to pay ₹270 while those with licensed stalls will pay ₹1,500 a month.
Further, the Municipal authorities will even conduct ground-level surveys wherein they will remove illegal hawkers. However, this decision of BMC has been opposed by Chandrakant Rao, who is the leader of the hawkers union.
He stated that they were promised relocation in 2018, which did not happen as planned. Hawkers are denied a license despite having valid documents so civic officials can charge them later. It is clearly a sign of extortion and the union will oppose it.
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Notably, after BMC designated hawker zones in Dadar West and Mahim, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) expressed disappointment and announced that they will stage a protest against the decision taken by the civic body. The BMC has designated several spaces for hawkers in the residential areas of Dadar West and Mahim. The road below the MNS headquarters at Mahim has also been marked as a hawkers zone.
Labelling it as a “faulty move”, MNS leader Yeshwant Killedar said that this will cause trouble for the residents. “The hawkers will disrupt peace in the Mahim-Dadar belt,” said Killedar, adding that the BMC should cancel the whole process of marking hawkers’ zone and re-start the process.
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MNS has always opposed the hawkers' policy framed by the BMC and the party carried a huge agitation against the hawkers in 2017 after the stampede incident on Elphinston railway station (now Prabhadevi).
After MNS conducted a rally against the hawkers in light of the stampede incident, an order from the Bombay High Court confined the hawker activities to 100 meters away from religious places, hospitals and educational institutes. The HC also stated that no hawker activities should take place within 150 meters of railway stations, market places and municipal corporations.
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