— Photo: Ashoke Chakrabarty

UP IN ARMS: Vendors from all over the state taking out a rally to press for their demands on the occasion of national Vendors' Day in Bhubaneswar on Saturday.

BHUBANESWAR: With vendors continuing to encroach upon lanes and by-lanes of the capital city, women associations backed by an umbrella body of citizens' groups have launched a unique initiative to put an end to the menace in their locality.

Members of six women organizations on Saturday took the lead in Sailashree Vihar locality to vacate an encroached government land for rehabilitating vendors while the roadside traders were convinced to shift to the place being cleared for them.

The women's bodies are working in close coordination with Sailashree Vihar Unayan Parishad (SVUP), the umbrella body of 31 citizens' groups, and Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) in a three-day-long special drive to clear the approach road to their colony. This was the first instance when community leaders in a large numbers have volunteered to make city look clean, BMC Commissioner Aparajita Sarangi said.

``We have asked vendors to shift to the vending zone and auto rickshaw drivers to park their vehicles in a parking zone. And they readily agreed to our proposal,'' Sailashree Vihar Women's Association (SVWA) secretary Subhra Mishra said.

Initiative

The community initiative was thought of when reports of growing incidents of accidents owing to the congested road reached denizens of the locality. Subsequently, the SVUP informed the BMC and urged it to act upon. When BMC solicited community participation, the SVUP took all the groups, including auto drivers' association, into confidence and chalked out a strategy to launch the unique joint effort. On its part, the BMC on Saturday levelled the surface for vending zone and assured to help raise a non-concrete structure for the purpose. Similarly, the parking zones were created along the roadside.

"We are sure that the new vending zone would accommodate 500 vendors. We will not touch cabins now. It has been decided that no vendors will be allowed set up their shop on road in future," SVUP general secretary Dillip Kumar Sahoo said. The civic body has so far created 13 vending zones in the city while working on another eight such zones. "As of now the concept of vending zone is getting encouraging response from different localities of the city. We will be having eight new zones in the next two months,'' Ms Sarangi said.She, however, made it clear that "it is impossible to rehabilitate all the vendors in these zones. Of 9000 registered vendors, 1,000 roadside traders have so far been asked to operate from vending zones," she said. Earlier in the day, hundreds of vendors took out a rally from Ram Mandir to Rajmahal Square to mark the National Vendors' Day. "Government should implement national policy for vendors in these zones," president of Nikhila Utkal Asthayee Dokanee Mahasangha Pratap Kumar Sahoo said.

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