Hawkers in Kolkata - Background

Background

The population of Kolkata urban agglomeration grew from 1,510,000 in 1901 to 4,670,000 in 1951 to 9,194,000 in 1981. Kolkata did not draw in people from rural areas by offering a better quality of life. As in any other Indian city, the immigrants found poverty in Kolkata as severe and dehumanising as in the villages, but was offered a relatively quick opportunity of new income through placement in the urban economy. With the partition of India in 1947, the metropolitan cities of Kolkata and Delhi were flooded by displaced persons or refugees from Pakistan. The Union government at Delhi, with better resources at its command, handled the task of rehabilitation faster and more comprehensively, than the state government in Kolkata could accomplish. Left largely to themselves the refugees in Kolkata gradually secured their placements in the urban economy.

The 1951 census found that only 33.2 percent of Kolkata’s inhabitants were city-born, the rest were immigrants: 12.3 percent were from elsewhere in West Bengal, 26.6 percent from other Indian states, and 26.9 percent from East Pakistan. In 1981, the Government of West Bengal estimated the total number of persons displaced from East Bengal to the state to be around 8 million or one sixth of the total population of the state. Several million refugees settled in the outskirts of Kolkata.

The percentage of migrants in Kolkata’s population has been declining since the 1950s, though around a third of the population still consists of fresh migrants. Kolkata is gradually attaining a state of saturation. It has also been affected by economic decline resulting from industrial sickness. In 2005, West Bengal headed the list of states with sick units. The overall economic scenario is highlighted by the growing number of pavement dwellers. Kolkata had 48,802 pavement dwellers in 1971 and 55,571 in 1985, according to Census and/or KMDA figures. Around two thirds are from West Bengal and the rest from outside the state.

While the economy of Kolkata has been sliding backwards in many respects, there has been remarkable expansion in certain areas – real estate, information technology and retail trade. Big shopping centres have come up, and along with it there has been a large increase in small shops and pavement stalls.

Political Actions

With hawkers occupying large portions of the pavements, in the sixties the state government, then controlled by the Congress Party, launched Operation Hawker and tried to remove hawkers from the streets of Kolkata. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), then in the opposition, organised the hawkers in active protest. Soon thereafter, the Congress Party was out of power in the state. Later, when the CPI(M) was firmly in saddle as leader of the Left Front for around two decades, it launched Operation Sunshine in 1996. Officers of Kolkata Municipal Corporation, cadres of the CPI(M) along with police battalions demolished the side walk stalls of thousands of hawkers. Such stalls had lined the city’s thoroughfares for nearly three decades. This time the hawkers were mobilised by opposition leaders such as Mamata Banerjee but the Left Front remained firm in its conviction to remove hawkers. However, in the face of protests, the municipal administration and the police allowed the hawkers to reoccupy gradually the pavements of streets from which they had been cleared. The Calcutta Hawker Sangram Committee, a union of more than 32 local hawkers' associations formed in the beforemath of Operation Sunshine, took the leadership to reclaim the footpaths . The situation has come to such a pass that according to a deputy commissioner of Kolkata Police, 80 per cent of Kolkata’s pavements are encroached by hawkers and illegal settlers. Pedestrians are forced to use the roads because there is hardly any space on the pavements for walking, and once people are getting used to walking on the streets, they continue to do so even if the side walks are vacant. Some reports suggest that the hawkers have made a comeback on the streets of Kolkata during the period 2000-2005 when Trinamool Congress was in power in Kolkata Corporation. Bandyopadhyay (2009)has recently argued that the Hawker Sangram Committee has subsequently come to occupy a central position in the governance of the realm of pavement-hawking through the creation and maintenance of an archival database that articulates the entrepreneurial capacity of the 'poor hawker' and his ability to deliver goods and services at low-cost. The significance of the Hawker Sangram Committee's archive is that, it enables the organisation to form a critique of the exclusionary discourses on the hawker, mostly propagated by a powerful combination of a few citizens' associations, the judiciary and the press. The paper also documents how the successful mobilisation of a population group like the hawkers is marked by the virtual destruction of a pre-existing archive on the other group of 'encroachers' of the pavement space, the pavement dwellers.