In a recent meeting, the committee suggested that there should not be any ‘no hawking zone’. President of Calcutta Hawkers Men’s Union Shaktiman Ghosh said, “hawking in some areas may be regulated but should not be altogether banned.”

The committee suggested a set of rules for regulation of hawkers in the city. It proposed that no hawker should be allowed within five feet of the main gate of government offices and on the footpath just opposite the main gate. Hospitals and nursing home premises cannot be used as hawking zone. 

 Responding to the demands of the committee, Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya said, “We cannot claim that we will not have any no hawking zone in the city. Sometimes the KMC needs to declare an area as no hawking zone. But we are yet to finalise which areas should fall under such zones.”

The KMC has also decided that the hawkers, who used to conduct business on Park Street footpaths till December 2006, can return. The civic body has directed the Hawkers’s Sangram Samity and Kolkata Street Hawker’s Association to submit a list of such hawkers.