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The
other day a report appeared in the vernacular press that last week a fire broke
out in the main plaza of the New Market somewhere near a very popular temple.
The Fire Service was summoned which reacted very promptly but could not do
anything to extinguish the fire as the approaches were clogged by parked two and
four wheelers. Inside the plaza there was utter chaos with hawkers of all kinds
occupying every inch of space to display their wares. It was more so because it
happened to be a Sunday.
This
is not the only place where hawkers create congestion. The Nawabi-era market
called the Chowk area also suffers from the same predicament. Numerous efforts
have been made to bestow on it an appearance that is in harmony with its
heritage status. But no, things were back to where they were soon enough. The situation in these bazaars is so bad now,
leave alone a fire tender, one cannot really negotiate the streets even on foot
with ease. The crowds of hawkers with their pushcarts or wares spread on the
roadside and the parked two wheelers make shopping a horrendous experience.
Barring
a few, roads in Bhopal wear a chaotic look with hawkers running riot. Then
there are kiosks (locally called gumties) all over the place by the sides of
roads that are nothing but encroachments on public spaces causing hindrance to
traffic and people’s mobility. Persistent encroachments have made many roads so
narrow that both ways traffic has to move only on half of the total space of what
are reasonably wide roads. No city in India, probably, suffers from this kind
of acute problem as Bhopal.
Only
a few people are responsible for this difficult and deplorable situation. They
are the rent seekers – the elected representatives in the municipal corporation
and the local legislative assembly. It is virtually a racket where they rent
out the public spaces for a monthly payment by the encroacher, strangely making
money by renting out government land. This is how kiosks are installed on the
roadsides and whenever attempts are made to remove them by the municipal
bureaucracy they intervene rather violently. After all, most of them are no
better than dregs of society.
Likewise,
thousands of hawkers who have never sought a license to ply their trade roam
the streets or park their carts where they think they would find more custom without
any consideration towards the busy traffic. As they have paid rent to one of
the rent-seekers who is their benefactors they are sanguine that it is they
(the rent seekers) who would ensure that they are not tormented and removed
from wherever they have decided to carry on their business. The municipal
corporation has provided hawkers’ corners but many would shun them and choose
the easy way out to ply their illegal trade on congested roads making life
difficult for the rest of the mobile humanity.
The
elected representatives to various representative bodies consider it their
right to plant anybody anywhere for a consideration and they are utterly
unmindful of the law and their enforcers. A municipal councilor or a member of
legislative assembly is a powerful person, a big (and mostly corrupt) man, who can
dispatch any person coming in his way to oblivion without any questions being
asked. These gentlemen act like mafia. When things hot up against the
encroachers it is these rent-seekers who raise the cry of deprivation of
livelihood against the law-enforces. Livelihood is a very sensitive matter and a
seeming attempt to deprive it is more so.
At
the back of all this is rural-urban migration. As aspirations increase or as
circumstances in rural areas nose dive people move towards cities in search of
means of livelihood. The first foray they make is to push some product on a
daily wage or on commission basis standing on the streets or occupying a tract
of foot path. Gradually they progress to push carts and then on to a kiosk, if
at all. In all this the rent-seekers play an important role. Not only do they
extort rent from them for plying a trade, they also fix them up with a shanty
on a piece of government land. In course of time, in case a mafia don has found
a new-comer submissive and prompt in making payments to him he may even have a title
issued for the shanty in the name of the new encroacher.
It is a big unlawful business being carried on
by politicians, petty and big, unhindered for decades. None has enough guts to
dismantle the whole illegal structure for, after all, the rent-seekers have the
backing of the government; in fact, they are the government. They have made
encroaching on government lands a source of illegitimate income, at the same
time creating a constituency for themselves making migration into the town very
attractive. It was the Late Chief Minister Arjun Singh who took the first step
by offering titles to the lands occupied by encroachers behind the Governor’s
House. Since then it has been virtually free for all. There is not an area in
the city which is devoid of shanties. One was surprised to find that they had
even used the huge properties of the local collector’s and commissioner’s
offices for settling migrants. None of the supposedly powerful IAS officers
could perhaps do anything as it was politically sensitive; any effort to remove
them would promptly be countered by the argument of dismantling of poor people’s
shelters bringing the officials out in bad light.
Whether
it is the streets or the government lands, they are not going to be freed of
encroachers any time soon. In today’s India rural-urban migration is a fact of
life. It appears to be the aim of the government to balance out the rural and
urban population at 50:50. But, generally, there has been no preparation by the
local government to receive such heavy numbers of migrants. The provisions made
under Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) were far too modest and
could not have met the astronomical requirements of housing for poor. Besides,
many such houses built under JNNURM and Rajiv Awas Yojna have remained vacant
while shanties or jhuggis keep multiplying.
In
Bhopal even the City Development Plan has not been published after the one
brought out in 1995 that expired in 2005. The local city administration has,
therefore, got far more than what it can chew and, naturally, things are going
haywire. There is no indication of any step to control the oncoming messy
situation. In the midst of all this confusion there is only one section of the
population, the rent-seekers, who are making not only merry but also making hay.
Or, maybe, it is they who are obstructing the very
process of city-planning. One couldn’t really tell; in this topsy-turvy world
that we live in anything is possible.
*Photo: from
internet
17th
August 2017
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