GHMC fails to regulate hawkers

Hyderabad: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation’s proposed plan to restrict hawkers to certain zones and issue identity cards to them by January hasn’t materialized.

GHMC had announced that “hawkers zones” would be identified by January and categorized as Red, Blue and Green. The proposal is to not allow any business activities in Red zones, put time limits on the Blue zone and make the Green zones unrestricted areas.

“The identification of zones is still on and it will take some more time. However, the work is progressing,” said an official from the Town Planning wing of GHMC. Reportedly, the work got delayed because of the ongoing property tax drive. The plan is to distribute street vendors/hawkers across the zones and rehabilitate them.

“Once zones are identified and surveys completed, we will be able to work on a plan to rehabilitate the street vendors. Circulars were sent to all the five zones and as of now, the survey of hawkers itself hasn’t been completed, so we can’t comment on the rehabilitation aspect,” said a senior official from the Urban Community Development department of GHMC.

Officials estimate that not less than 15,000 encroachments by street vendors exist across the city.

The official from UCD said, “As of now, even if we remove the encroachments on some given day, the hawkers will come back in a day or two as we are still in the process of identifying places to rehabilitate them.”