Kolkata: Chowringhee
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The Grand hotel/ Hawkers
As in 2024 Jan
Zeeshan Javed, January 14, 2024: The Times of India
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From: Zeeshan Javed, January 14, 2024: The Times of India
Sun shines on Kol landmark after years, but for how long?
Last November’s high court order made the pavement outside Oberoi Grand walkable again, but in a city starved of employment avenues hawkers are likely to make a comeback, as they have done after numerous clean-up drives over the past 50 years
Before it became Oberoi Grand, the hotel was called The Grand. Locals still call it Grand Hotel. But once upon a time, it wasn’t such a grand place. During the 1930s, six people died there during a typhoid epidemic and it was closed in 1937. Mohan Singh Oberoi came to the rescue. He leased the property, reopened it in 1939, and bought it in 1943. The hotel couldn’t have been better located – right on Chowringhee in the city’s heart with its wide roads and wide pavements.
What Oberoi could never have imagined was that 80 years after he bought the hotel, while the property would grow in grandeur the pavement outside would all but vanish, taken over by hawkers who would spread out their multicoloured, multipurpose wares – toys, underwear, mobile covers, tees, chequered pyjamas – and hang thick, shiny plastic sheets with ropes from those white British-era neoclassical columns to keep the Chowringhee sun out. It is hard to imagine another setting where squalor does a daily tango with grandeur.
It took a Calcutta High Court order last November to get the town vending committee to free up two-thirds of the pavement outside Oberoi Grand for pedestrians. The Chowringhee sun could once again slant past those neoclassical columns. But for how long?
Operation Sunshine
Nearly 30 years ago, the Left Front government decided it was time to clean up Kolkata. Jyoti Basu was chief minister then; his government had been in office for almost 20 years and minister Subhash Chakraborty, who was seldom seen without his white cricket hat, launched ‘Operation Sunshine’ – a project to free pavements of hawkers and other encroachments, without a court’s prod. All temporary structures across the city were demolished. Overnight, the city looked different. Overnight, thousands lost their livelihoods.
“When the Left Front realised they weren’t getting much political support in Kolkata, they perhaps believed that cleaning up footpaths would make them popular with the urban elite. Operation Sunshine followed. But they were not prepared for what happened after that,” said Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury of the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, which is into policy studies on east and North-East India.
Immediately after Operation Sunshine, Kolkata had to brave the dark clouds of hawker rage. They not only reoccupied the pavements and thoroughfares but also united under the umbrella of Hawker Sangram Committee that gave them more lobbying power. The boldest move ever by any government in the state to free up the city’s pavements came to nothing.
Burden Of History
Over 75 years ago, when Oberoi Grand was coming into its own, Sir Cyril Radcliffe was in Delhi, suffering from a Delhi belly and the suffocating July heat, and trying to make sense of a boundary line that would forever divide India and Pakistan. His boundary award unleashed the first tidal wave of refugees that swamped Calcutta. More would follow when East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971.
According to the 1951 Census, the increase in West Bengal’s population between 1946 and 1951 was the equivalent of 50 years of normal population growth. “Partition of Bengal preceded by the Bengal famine knocked off the remaining pillars of the state’s economy and the influx of millions of refugees demanded their rehabilitation. During Dr B C Roy’s chief ministership, a number of hawkers’ corners were set up in north and south Kolkata, followed by the central business district of Esplanade/Chowringhee,” Basu Ray Chaudhury said.
Then, the jute industry – a major source of livelihood in West Bengal – collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s. “The state’s industrial decline, particularly the jute industry’s decimation, caused more unemployment, this time among migrant labourers from Bihar, eastern UP and Odisha. This also increased the number of street vendors, as it did in Mumbai after the closure of many cloth mills in that city,” he added.
Inter-state migration also played a major role. Kolkata was still an economic hub, while neighbouring Bihar and Jharkhand hardly had any industry. So, many from those states reached Kolkata in search of a livelihood.
Patterns Of Settlement
“Refugees from East Pakistan, who were mostly Bengali Hindus, had state support. The government made policies helping them rehabilitate and make a living. They settled down mainly in areas like Gariahat, Jadavpur, Baghajatin, Shyambazar and Hatibagan. People who came to Kolkata from neighbouring states got off trains in Howrah and Sealdah and sought to make a living around those areas. As a result, most hawkers in Burrabazar, Posta, MG Road, Canning Street, Rajabazar, Chandni, Esplanade and Chowringhee were from other states, not Bangladesh,” said Piyali Ba nerjee, a former anthropology professor of Calcutta University who specialises in different types of migration.
Politics At Play
By the 1960s, Kolkata pavements were so encroached that the municipal corporation had to routinely launch antiencroachment drives. But the problem never went away. That was when the government hit upon a solution: why not move the hawkers out to a market all of their own? Thus was born the B C Roy Market (named after the chief minister).
For a while, this worked. But more hawkers replaced those who had moved to the market. In 1975, the government realised that its revenue from markets owned by civic bodies was declining because people were buying more from hawkers. So, they cracked down on hawkers in earnest – just as the Left Front government would do 20 years later with Operation Sunshine. While Sunshine ended up uniting the hawkers under a single umbrella, the 1975 crackdown made them coalesce under different political umbrellas.
For the Left parties, fighting for the underprivileged, the hawkers were a big catch, what they hoped would be a captive vote bank. And that paid off, for some time at least. But everything comes at a cost. Gleaming shopfronts set back against neatly paved footpaths signal prosperity and push up a city’s brand score, but deprive a resourceless population from making a livelihood by hawking wares.
“Hawkers generate business worth thousands of crores every year and are an integral part of the city. The government must ensure proper jobs and financial security for them and their families before evicting them,” said Shaktiman Ghosh of the Hawker Sangram Committee.
“Post-2011, when Trinamool came to office, the number of vendors has increased as there aren’t too many opportunities of gainful employment for the less-qualified in this city. However, there has not been any consistent policy on hawkers in the city,” said Basu Ray Chaudhury.
