In an interim order passed by the division bench of Chief Justice Y K Sabharwal and Justice S Radhakrishnan, the BMC has also been asked to finalise the hawking and the non-hawking zones in the city by July 1, 1999. The BMC has also been asked to file an affidavit citing the amount collected by the civic corporation through paotis since they were first introduced on August 1, 1988.

Paotis are daily refuse collection charges collected by the BMC officials from unlicensed hawkers and are not considered by the civic authorities to be a permission for hawking. However, based on these paotis, which do not have the name of either the collector or the person to whom it is issued, hawkers have moved the courts a number of times and have gained injunctions againstany action by the civic body against them, from the lower courts.

As reported by the Express Newsline, the division bench of the Chief Justice had on Monday picked holes in the issuance of the paotis by the BMC and asked the BMC counsel to quote the law under which the paotis were being issued. It was also argued by the counsel for various citizens' groups that paotis are issued by the ward officials to just about anybody, with no register maintained about the place where the hawker proposed to sit or the wares he is supposed to sell. In fact, members of various citizens' groups showed that they were able to collect `paotis' themselves, with none of the ward officials asking for any details.

The Chief Justice had made it clear then that the paoti system would have to go. Today the order made it official. The matter now stands adjourned to July 1, 1999.

The division bench passed the orders after hearing a clutch of around 40 petitions regarding the hawking zones that are onthe anvil for the city since 1995 when the Supreme Court first directed the city to finalise such zones. While citizens groups from Chembur, Sion and the prominent Citizens Forum for Protection of Open Public Spaces, urged that hawkers could not be rehabilitated in open spaces especially in residential areas, various hawkers groups and unions pleaded with the bench that the civic body be restrained from taking action against them till the zones are finalised.

Today, the court refused to grant any such direction to the civic body. In fact the bench clarified that the BMC was free to take action against all unauthorised hawkers as per the law and was not restrained in any way, as the BMC believed by the order of the Bombay High Court of November 1998.

Counsel for the BMC, Mohan Rao, today submitted that while the civic body had demarcated hawking zones in all its 23 wards, it had received a large number of objections and the final plan of the zones are yet to be approved by the general body of thecorporation. The plans are expected to be approved by July 1, he added.

To this, the division bench noted that if the BMC fails to approve and implement the scheme by July 1, the court will itself pass orders banning hawking on access roads to railway stations, hundred metres from places of worship and along major arterial roads -- following the outline drawn by the civic body itself.