No hawking, only walking
60,000 vendors near stations will be moved to skywalks….Chittaranjan Tembhekar
60,000 vendors near stations will be moved to skywalks….Chittaranjan Tembhekar
Efforts are on to clear your station roads of hawkers and make it a haven for both pedestrians and vehicles.
The two main civic agencies Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) have joined hands to ensure that hawkers do not come back to earth literally, once 100 skywalks are ready at 76 train stations in the city.
Plans are afoot to accommodate 60,000 hawkers in the 100 proposed skywalks. Even the well-entrenched hawking conglomerates like the Fashion Street and Linking Road would be shifted to the elevated skywalks.
An agreement was signed on Thursday between metropolitan commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad and additional municipal commissioner RA Rajeev after the meeting discussed threadbare rehabilitation of hawkers outside stations on the skywalks. As per the agreement, each pitch will be measuring 1.5m x 1.5m and would be allotted to two vendors.
Both MMRDA and BMC will be constructing 50 skywalks each and would be responsible for accommodating 30,000 hawkers each. This is a major step towards accomplishing station area traffic improvement scheme (Satis) which has been handed over to BMC and was pending for several years, Gaikwad told media, admitting that rehabilitation of slums around stations was a tougher task. He assured that agencies would not allow hawking under skywalks, once the rehabilitation is done on the proposed skywalks. He said the agreement between the two agencies would be a part of an affidavit on hawking policy to be submitted to the Supreme Court soon.
For us, the first skywalk that will come up between Bandra (East) and Bandra-Kurla Complex would be the litmus test, he said. Police help would be sought to keep spaces under skywalks free of encroachment.